260426 Demonic Strongholds Operating in Political Discourse

by Thomas Abshier | May 1, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Eight Strongholds: A Christos Civitas Reading of the “Ingredients” Joan Swirsky Inventoried

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 30, 2026 | Revised May 1, 2026

Ingredients That Make Up Our Body Politic – News With Views

Occasion: A column by Joan Swirsky published at NewsWithViews uses a Food Network metaphor as scaffolding for an inventory of eight characteristics she attributes to Democrats as a class — consistent negativity, dependence on big government, behaving like infants/children, anger on parade, jealousy, victims R us, conceit, intolerance. The column is sharp, polemical, and aimed at producing the reader’s confidence that the November 2026 midterms will properly dispose of all the Democrat bums. I want to engage the column not because Joan and I disagree about most of the substantive concerns she names — we do not — because the eight items Joan inventoried turn out, on closer inspection, to be a remarkably accurate catalog of demonic strongholds once they are understood for what they are. This essay re-purposes Joan’s inventory toward what it actually catalogs and develops the asymmetry between the strongholds that capture progressives and the failures of execution that afflict conservatives.

The philosophical position governing this essay: Both the progressive and the conservative are subject to unholy spirits, but the spirits are not the same, and the spiritual conditions they produce are not symmetric. The Democratic Party, as an institutionalized movement, has, across multiple decades and through deliberate policy and rhetorical strategy, cultivated spirits that operate in active rebellion against God’s order — the strongholds Joan named. The orientation of that movement is toward false gods. The conservative movement, by contrast, is in its mainstream form oriented correctly toward the right God; its failures, when they appear, are failures of execution within a fundamentally correct orientation rather than failures of orientation itself. The conservative does not need to repent of his confession that the unborn child is a person, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that Christ is Lord, that the constitutional ordering protects what Scripture commands the state to protect. He needs, in many cases, to repent of his lukewarmness in defending what he confesses, of his niceness-as-cowardice in the face of cultural attack, of his expectation that elected leaders will deliver the cultural restoration that only personal-family-community spiritual transformation can deliver, of his hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage that consume his energy without channeling it into righteous action. The vehicle is different, but both spirits are unholy. The corrective is not the same in both cases, and the framework that pretends otherwise has flattened a real distinction. This essay names the asymmetry honestly. The framework operates at three levels — spiritual (the principalities and powers themselves), individual (the human persons captured), and institutional (the organizations that function as vehicles) — and at each level, the asymmetry is preserved.

Context: This is the second essay to work from the four-component Christos Civitas Code framework rather than developing it, following the Leaman political-violence engagement. The asymmetric-orientation principle developed here is itself a substantive framework correction that will need to be integrated into the Christos Civitas Code book in a future revision. The framework correction is documented in the paired meta-document and in templates/RM_organizational_open_questions.md as theological clarification T3.

To the Fellowship —

Joan Swirsky has done us a small favor. I do not think she meant to, but the substantive accuracy of what she observed is greater than the rhetorical use she put it to, and the inventory she cataloged — once relocated to its proper level — turns out to be a useful theological resource. Joan named eight characteristic traits she sees in the contemporary political moment. She labeled them Democrat ingredients. They are something more specific than that. They are demonic strongholds, eight of them, each with its own operating signature and a distinct relationship to the parties of the contemporary political moment. Some of them have been deliberately cultivated by the Democratic Party as an electoral strategy and now function as core organizing principles of progressive political life. Others have come, in milder or different form, to afflict conservatives also — but the conservative affliction is not, in most cases, the same captivity. It is a failure of execution against the right adversary, often arising from lukewarmness, fear, or the substitution of niceness for the boldness the moment requires. The framework names both honestly. It does not pretend they are the same.

Paul named the situation precisely. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). The wrestling is not with our progressive neighbors. The wrestling is not with our family members who voted differently. The wrestling is with what has captured them. The captured are not the enemy. The spirits that captured them are. And this we must say plainly: the contemporary church in the West has, in large measure, forgotten that we are at war. We have laid down our weapons. We have made truce with the enemy. We have substituted devotion-with-attendance for devotion-with-fire. We have called our cowardice “love” and our silence “tolerance.” We are, as the Fire at the Center essay named it, a Laodicean church — neither cold nor hot — and the fire that the adversary has, misdirected as it is, far exceeds the fire we have for the One we say we worship. This is the cardinal sin of the Western church, and it shapes how the eight strongholds operate through us.

So let us walk through Joan’s inventory. Each stronghold named, with its biblical resonance, its operating signature, the captivity it produces in its primary form, the conservative failure of execution that allows it to advance, the institutional vehicles, and the discipline of resistance. The framework is not partisan. It is principled. But principled does not mean symmetric, and the same eyes that see the captivity in our progressive neighbors must see the different failure in ourselves with equal honesty.

A pastoral note before we begin. The eight strongholds are not just abstract spiritual categories. They are the actual operating modes by which actual human beings — our daughter, our brother-in-law, our college roommate, our former pastor — are being held. When I name a stronghold and describe its operating signature, I am describing what is currently happening inside someone we love. The naming is not contempt. It is diagnosis, in the medical sense, in service of rescue. Speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ (Ephesians 4:15). The truth-telling is the love. The pastoral target of this essay is therefore not Joan’s audience of fellow conservatives but God-in-the-captured-neighbors who are reading this and need correction delivered as God would want it delivered. Humor is allowed where humor is appropriate; the humor is directed at the spirits, not at the captured.

Stronghold I — Negativity

Joan’s first item is consistent negativity: she describes a settled posture in which the sky is always falling, the glass is always half empty, and the worst is always right around the corner.

This is the spirit of perpetual lament, and it has biblical names. Murmuring and complaining are how the apostles named it in their Greek (gongusmos, the murmuring of the children of Israel in the wilderness; me gogguzete, do not murmur, in 1 Corinthians 10:10). It is the captivity that produces in human beings an inability to see the good in what God has given. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things (Philippians 4:8). The spirit of negativity is the spirit that systematically refuses Philippians 4:8 — that finds, in every situation, the angle from which the situation looks dark, and absorbs the human being into a permanent posture of grievance.

The captivity captures human beings on every side. The progressive captive of negativity sees the United States as fundamentally a story of injustice and oppression, with whatever progress has been made overwhelmed by the structures that remain. The conservative captive of negativity sees America as already lost, the culture beyond saving, every passing day producing more evidence that the country is past the point of recovery. Both are captured by the same spirit. The signature is the same: an organizing posture of the worst is right around the corner, an inability to receive any good news without immediate qualification, a settled assumption that the universe is bent against what we love.

The institutional vehicles for this stronghold are real. Cable news on every side has built a business model on activating it. The progressive captives are reliably nourished by one set of channels; the conservative captives by another. The Democratic Party has, in its rhetorical strategy, made systematic appeals to the negativity-captured progressive — the country is in a state of crisis, fascism is at the door, the planet is dying, all is lost without our urgent action. The Republican Party has, in its rhetorical strategy, made systematic appeals to the negativity-captured conservative — the culture is collapsing, the institutions are gone, all is lost without our urgent action. Both parties are mobilizing the stronghold’s captives. Both parties are reliable vehicles for this spirit. The believer who recognizes the stronghold sees the operation on both sides simultaneously, refuses to be activated by either, and grieves over the captured on both sides.

The discipline of resistance: Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice (Philippians 4:4). Not the cheap optimism that pretends nothing is wrong, but the rooted joy that knows what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do — and refuses to be displaced from that knowledge by the political climate of any given week.

Stronghold II — Dependence as captivity to a parental state

Joan’s second item is dependence on big government: she frames the captives as needy and scared children, at a loss to function adequately in the adult world.

This is the spirit of infantile passivity dressed up as compassion, and it captures human beings by offering them a substitute for the actual work of forming their souls into mature image-bearers of God. The biblical resonance is the murmuring of Israel in the wilderness, wishing for the fleshpots of Egypt (Exodus 16:3) — preferring the security of slavery to the responsibility of freedom. Egypt provided. The wilderness required. The captives chose the providing.

The stronghold operates by persuading the human being that someone else is responsible for what the human being is responsible for. Someone else can be the state, an ideology, a charismatic leader, a tribal affiliation, or a parental figure who refuses to let the adult emerge. The mechanism is the same. The captive surrenders the burden of his own moral, economic, intellectual, and spiritual formation to an external agent who agrees to carry it on his behalf, and in exchange surrenders the freedom and dignity that come with bearing the burden himself.

The progressive form of captivity is most visible in Joan’s framing — the citizen who looks to the state for cradle-to-grave provision, who experiences the suggestion that he might be responsible for himself as a form of cruelty. The conservative form is real but less acknowledged. The conservative captive of this stronghold looks to a principled political leader and a party majority in the legislature to fix the big problems of the state, the economy, the environment, education, foreign relations, etc. Desiring and working to elect moral leadership to set the moral/legal framework at the macro level of the state, nation, and nations is a correct impulse. But without a moral/spiritual transformation of the populace at the personal and interpersonal levels, the legislative work of a moral majority of legislators will be inadequate to take and hold Godly societal programming. The conservative must be the agent of moral witness by example and leadership/enrollment of his own family and community in righteousness and the defense of the Faith. The work of government in setting the tone of the culture is important, but we cannot wait for elected leadership or our political tribe to do the full job of delivering cultural restoration. We must be the salt and light in our world, which gives a witness to the transforming power of the Gospel by our words, actions, and the way we love God, self, and neighbors. Podcasts and talk shows can be educational, offering perspectives outside our insular and mundane world, but we must resist the hopelessness, anger, and fear that should mobilize us to action rather than paralyze us. The conspiracies, cancellations, and improper influence (money, sex, and power) may be real, fabricated, or distorted, but independent validation of their truth is usually not possible. Retaining hope and doing the work of personal witness is where we all must live and can make a difference. We can rightfully criticize Democrats who are captive to the listed principalities and powers, but if we allow ourselves to be dragged into hopelessness, chronic anger, or fear, then we have become captives of another spirit. We are both subject to the temptation and being captured by unholy spirits. The vehicle is different, but both spirits are unholy.

The Democratic Party has, in its policy and rhetorical posture across multiple decades, systematically activated this stronghold among its electoral base. This is empirically observable in the platform documents and the rhetorical strategies; it is not a partisan caricature. We will take care of you is a recurring frame in Democratic mobilization, directed precisely at the demographic the stronghold has captured. To the extent this is the party’s de facto strategy — and, across multiple cycles, it has been — the party is functioning as a vehicle for this spirit, organizing the captives, mobilizing them, and rewarding their captivity with policy outcomes that deepen it. This is the institutional accountability the framework requires us to name. The Republican Party has its own institutional patterns that reward the conservative form of the same stronghold — the expectation that moral leaders will save us, that top-down government will legislate, execute, and judge our way back to moral uprightness as a nation. To expect righteous leaders to arise from a morally corrupt nation, with the media-education indoctrination in worldly/Godless values, becomes ever more unlikely as the culture manifests the values being trained into our youths, and modeled by their elders. The question is what is the appropriate response to the latest perversion of science, legislation of immorality, the silencing of critics by deplatforming, or worse, the control of industry by lobbyists, or the judicial overreach that prevents justice, etc.? Hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage is its own principality and power to resist.

The discipline of resistance: the recovery of mature personhood under God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God (Galatians 2:20). The believer is not infantilized; he has been made son, capable of bearing the responsibilities sonship requires. The political agent is not the believer’s father. The party is not the believer’s family. The state is not the believer’s provider. The believer is to grow up into Christ.

Stronghold III — Infantilization

Joan’s third item is behaving like infants and children: she points to frequent temper tantrums, public obscenities, and the substitution of theatrical emotion for adult discourse.

This is the same spirit as Stronghold II viewed from a different angle. Where Stronghold II is the structural surrender of adult responsibility, Stronghold III is the behavioral expression of the surrender — the public performance of immaturity as a permanent personality state. The two are interlocking; Stronghold II produces Stronghold III, and Stronghold III ratifies Stronghold II.

The biblical witness on what mature adulthood looks like is consistent. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things (1 Corinthians 13:11). That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14). The believer is to grow up. The captivity to perpetual childishness — the inability to disagree without screaming, the inability to lose without melting down, the substitution of emotional intensity for argument, the public performance of feeling as a substitute for the work of thinking — is a stronghold. It is my opinion that the Democratic Party has planted the seeds, nurtured its growth, and facilitated its expression.

The conservative form deserves direct naming, because Joan’s column treats this as something only the political opposition does. The conservative-captive form of Stronghold III holds that good government policy will solve the underlying social problems. Yes, it will help, and is necessary, but the body politic has turned the task of teaching values over to secular public schools and attended churches that do not strongly organize their congregants toward manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.

The church should teach the Biblical patterns of character, application of Biblical metaphor to contemporary issues, and the connection between theological principles (salvation, repentance, holiness…) and daily personal expression. I contend that the lessons of the modern church are typically sufficiently far separated from the topics of life interactions during the week that there is little actual training in wisdom that makes a difference in the culture.

As adults, many of us never fully mature into adults, elders, or leaders in our families, businesses, and communities. Many do not take daily stands that risk security and community approval in their microcosm of influence that are necessary to spread to the society writ large, to make the fundamental changes in the common knowledge/law/ethics of that guides the self-discipline and interpersonal relationship guided by the standards of Godliness within individuals, between individuals, the dynamics of small groups, and the meta standard the becomes the spirit of Godliness that shapes population/societies/nations and the governmental organizations that codify, judge, and enforce that code.

As natural law conservatives and believers, we are polite in our discourse; we don’t teach our children to boldly speak the truth with love about issues of sexuality, government dependency, and the threat of implementing socialism. We fear the retaliation of the jihadists or being called intolerant and speak in the coded language of tolerance, diversity, and equality to the point of allowing hostile ideologies to establish enclaves of Sharia and other forms of hostile philosophy and government to exist as parallel governmental structures and societies. We are setting ourselves up for eventual hot conflict or being subsumed by another governmental form that will not honor the tolerance that has been used as a weapon against our Judeo-Christian moral foundation.  In other words, we have been infantilized, taught to be silent and nice children in the face of our politically correct/woke cultural masters. These are conservative failings; they are not the exact mirror image of the progressive failings Joan inventoried, but they are the stronghold’s operations through a different cultural channel.

Institutional vehicles operate on both sides, but their motives, means, and ends are different. Progressive activist groups have made tantrum-as-political-tactic a core organizing strategy across multiple decades. There is a strain of Conservative entertainment media that has made outrage a hook for engagement, but this is not the primary expression of conservative failing; it is passivity, hopelessness, disorganization, internecine squabbles/doctrinal purity fights in the presence of massive Right-Left distinctions, and submission to the creeping Leftward incrementalism of legislative advance.

To an extent, both parties reinforce this stronghold among their captives because it works. But outrage at evil is appropriate. The challenge is to keep it under control. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath (Ephesians 4:26). The challenge of maturity is to express the appropriate emotion and then return to equanimity and faith to be able to perform well in life. By contrast, the Democratic Party has purposefully endorsed emotional intensity, performed grievance, and theatrical childishness to generate engagement, donations, and electoral mobilization. The institutions reward what the stronghold produces, and so the stronghold deepens its grip.

To the extent that talk show hosts use this as a tactic, it is inappropriate; to the extent that it is righteous anger against evil, it is justified, and the challenge is then how to frame righteous anger. This is what institutional accountability looks like in practice. Those who activate and enroll righteous anger must direct their audience toward an effective outlet, a constructive direction to discharge those emotions in action. The institutions did not invent the stronghold, but to the extent they are building financial and organizational structures that reliably activate it, without directing righteous action, and use its activation across cycles, they are functional vehicles for it.

The discipline of resistance: Be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men (1 Corinthians 14:20). Childlike in trust toward God, in absence of malice toward neighbor, in receptivity to the truth. Adults in capacity to disagree without melting down, to lose without a tantrum, to engage difficult questions with sustained patience rather than emotional theater.

Stronghold IV — Anger as identity, and the failure to channel righteous anger

Joan’s fourth item is anger on parade: she observes that the captives in question seem perpetually angry or aggrieved about something, with the anger never resolving but instead reconstituting itself around new objects as old ones are addressed.

The progressive form of this stronghold is the spirit of perpetual grievance as identity. The captive does not have anger; the anger has the captive. The anger is no longer a response to a specific injustice that, once addressed, would dissolve; it is the captive’s defining characteristic, the lens through which every situation is processed, the channel through which every emotion is filtered. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath (Ephesians 4:26). Paul allows anger; he limits its duration. The captive of progressive grievance-identity has violated the duration limit by orders of magnitude — the sun has gone down on the same wrath for a decade, and the wrath is no longer wrath about something but the captive’s permanent resting state. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil (Psalm 37:8). Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice (Ephesians 4:31). The progressive captive is in active disobedience to these commands. The captivity is real, and Joan is right to name it.

But here the asymmetry must be insisted upon, because the conservative posture toward the cultural moment is not, in its mainstream form, the mirror image of progressive grievance-identity. It is something different.

The conservative who looks at the cultural revolution of the last two decades — at the redefinition of fundamental categories of human existence, at the legalized killing of unborn children at scale, at the ideological capture of educational and corporate and governmental institutions, at the open hostility to orthodox Christianity that has emerged in domains where Christianity was once the assumed framework, at the genocidal-violence question regarding Hamas and Hezbollah and the global resurgence of political Islam — and feels anger in response is not, in feeling that anger, captured by the spirit of perpetual grievance. He is feeling righteous anger at real evil. The anger is appropriate to the object. The biblical witness commands it. Ye that love the Lord, hate evil (Psalm 97:10). Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good (Romans 12:9). Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way (Psalm 119:104). The believer who feels nothing about what is being done in the cultural moment has not understood it. Righteous anger is justified and appropriate. Feel it, recognize its message, and take action. .

The conservative failure with respect to this stronghold lies elsewhere — in what is done with the anger. Three failure modes are common, and each is its own captivity that conservatives must repent of even as they hold the underlying anger in its proper place.

The first failure mode is anger that becomes identity rather than a response. A conservative who has so fully identified himself with grievance against the cultural revolution that he can no longer rest in the peace of God — who cannot watch the news without spiking blood pressure, who carries the day’s outrage into the night, who lets the sun go down on his wrath day after day until the wrath has become his permanent resting state — has fallen into the same captivity Paul forbade in Ephesians 4:26. The anger is not wrong in its origin; the failure is in its duration and its replacement of the believer’s God-given peace as resting state. The discipline is to express the appropriate emotion at the time appropriate, and then to return to equanimity, faith, and the rooted peace that allows the believer to perform well in the work to which he has been called. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).

The second failure mode is anger without action. The conservative who consumes outrage media for hours every day, who knows the latest atrocity before breakfast and the latest cultural-revolution overreach before dinner, but who does not act on the anger — does not vote, does not engage neighbors, does not raise children to speak boldly, does not build alternative institutions, does not pursue holiness in his own life, does not pray fervently, does not give sacrificially to the work of the kingdom — has converted righteous anger into spiritual entertainment. The anger has become a substitute for the action it was meant to mobilize. This is the wood-cricket condition, the Suicidal Sympathy essay named: parasitized to the point of ineffectiveness, watching the cliff approach while consuming commentary about the cliff.

The third failure mode is anger that hardens into hopelessness. The conservative who has watched the institutions captured one by one, who has seen the cultural ground he stood on dissolve under his feet, who has reached the conclusion that the country is lost, the church is lost, the West is lost, and there is nothing to be done, has fallen into a captivity that wears the costume of clear-eyed realism but is in fact despair. Hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage is its own principality and power to resist. The biblical witness on this is consistent. Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world (John 16:33). We are more than conquerors through him that loved us (Romans 8:37). If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31). The believer who has surrendered to despair has, in effect, denied that the God he confesses is God. The captivity is in the surrender, not in the sober assessment of the cultural situation.

The institutional vehicles for these three failure modes are familiar. Algorithmic social media has been engineered to maximize engagement, and that engagement is achieved by inflaming outrage among users on both sides. Conservative talk radio and online commentary have, in many quarters, built business models on sustaining viewers in the first failure mode (anger as identity) and the second (anger without action) — keeping the audience in a perpetual state of grievance-consumption that monetizes the captive’s permanent rage without ever directing it toward action, righteous formation, or the bold witness the moment requires. To the extent that conservative institutions activate righteous anger without channeling it into righteous action, they serve as vehicles for failure modes, even when their substantive analysis of the cultural moment is largely correct. Those who activate and enroll righteous anger must give their audience a proper outlet, a constructive direction to discharge those emotions in action. The institutional accountability is real.

But the asymmetry stands. The progressive captive of perpetual grievance-as-identity is angry about things that are largely not what he says they are — his anger is sustained by ideological frames that name oppressors who are not oppressors and victims who are not victims, by a victim-oppressor mythology that does not track real moral structure. The conservative captive of any of the three failure modes is angry about things that are largely what they are — the cultural revolution is real, the moral collapse is real, the threats to Christian witness are real. The conditions are not equivalent. The progressive captive needs reorientation: the world is not actually structured the way your anger assumes it is; the gospel offers a different and truer account of what is wrong with the world and what is being done about it. The conservative captive needs corrective action: the world is, in fact, structured the way your anger assumes; what you have not been doing is acting on what you see, channeling the anger into righteous engagement, holding peace as your resting state alongside the focused outrage at evil, and refusing to surrender to despair. Different correctives. Different conditions. Both need correction. Neither is simply a mirror of the other.

The discipline of resistance, for the believer in either condition, allows rage at the moment, in response to the specific injustice, oriented toward addressing it through righteous action. Permanent grievance-as-identity is to be put down. The believer’s resting state is the rooted peace of Philippians 4:7 — the peace of God, which passeth all understanding — alongside the focused, time-limited, action-channeled righteous anger that the moment requires. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Both halves of the verse must be operative.

Stronghold V — Jealousy, envy, and the conservative grief over real cultural loss

Joan’s fifth item names jealousy as one of humanity’s strongest emotions — second only to fear in her ranking — and locates its operation behind cancel-culture mechanisms and behind the disproportionate hostility toward Israel that some quarters of progressive politics display. The cancel-culture mechanism, on her reading, is envy operationalized at scale.

This is the spirit of envy, and the apostolic deposit treats it with unusual seriousness. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work (James 3:16). The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these  — hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders (Galatians 5:19–21). Envy is named in the same list as murder. The proximity is not rhetorical excess; envy is the operating spirit behind much of what the apostles called the works of the flesh.

Joan has located envy’s operation correctly in its primary contemporary form. The progressive cancel-culture mechanism is, on inspection, an envy-driven operation — the captive cannot tolerate the cultural recognition or institutional standing of those whose views he opposes, and constructs social mechanisms to destroy what he cannot have or be. The disproportionate progressive hostility toward Israel includes envy as a real component, alongside other ingredients (absorbed antisemitism, ideological captivity to anti-colonial frames misapplied to the Jewish state, and a network of disinformation operations that have shaped progressive academic and activist discourse for decades). The progressive captive of envy has built his political identity around the destruction of those he envies, and the apostolic deposit’s verdict on this captivity is severe.

But the asymmetry must be insisted upon here also. What conservatives experience when they observe the cultural-elite consensus, the dominance of progressive frameworks in educational institutions, the corporate enforcement of progressive cultural orthodoxy, the legal and journalistic protection of the progressive consensus against orthodox dissent — what conservatives experience is not, in its primary form, envy. It is grief over real cultural loss. The cultural goods that conservatives once shared have been, in many domains, deliberately taken from them by hostile cultural action, and the conservatives’ response to that taking is grief, lament, and the proper desire to recover what has been lost. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion (Psalm 137:1). The Israelites in exile were not envious of Babylon; they were grieving over Zion. This is the conservative posture toward the cultural moment in its proper form.

Grief over real loss can curdle into envy if it is mishandled. The conservative who has been carrying his grief over the cultural moment for so long that he has become bitter, who has come to resent the cultural elite as a class rather than to grieve over what has been done, who has begun to relish their hypothetical fall rather than to pray for their genuine repentance, has allowed his grief to be turned into envy by the spirit that is always working to do exactly that turning. The discipline is to keep the grief properly directed — toward the cultural goods that have been lost, toward the captured neighbors who have lost them along with us, toward God who alone can restore — rather than allowing it to curdle into resentment of the persons who currently occupy positions of cultural influence.

The biblical antidote is charity envieth not (1 Corinthians 13:4) — and rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15). Both halves are required. The believer who can rejoice in genuine goods even when those goods are currently being received by people whose cultural project he opposes — who can recognize a beautiful piece of progressive art as beautiful, a true progressive observation as true, a humane progressive instinct as humane — is the believer who has begun to be free of envy. The believer who cannot grant any progressive achievement any value because the progressive has achieved it has fallen into envy. The diagnostic question is whether goods can be received as goods, regardless of who currently holds them.

The discipline of resistance is therefore double. For the progressive captive of envy: turn from the destruction of those you envy, repent, and learn to receive God’s gifts to others as gifts rather than as wounds. For the conservative whose grief has begun to curdle: keep the grief properly directed at what has been lost rather than at those who currently hold cultural ground, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you (Matthew 5:44).

Stronghold VI — Victim-identification, and the conservative experience of real grievance

Joan’s sixth item is victims R us: she frames the progressive worldview as one in which the world is divided into helpless victims and cruel victimizers, with conservatives cast in the victimizer role and Democrats positioned as the compassionate saviors who alone can address the injustice.

The progressive form of this stronghold is the spirit of self-identification with victimhood as primary identity, organized around victim-categories that the captive’s culture has named as the basis for political organization. The stronghold captures by offering the captive a narrative role — the wronged one, the marginalized one, the oppressed one — that becomes the organizing frame of his life. The frame is not negotiable; the captive cannot consider whether he is in fact a victim of what he claims to be a victim of, because the question itself is experienced as further victimization.

The biblical witness on the believer’s identity is the opposite. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God (1 John 3:1). Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ (Galatians 4:7). The believer’s primary identity is sonship. Whatever he has suffered — and the believer has suffered — the suffering is not his identity. The suffering is something he has gone through. Sonship is who he is.

Joan’s locating of victim-identification on the progressive side is empirically defensible — and the asymmetry here matters. The Democratic Party’s electoral coalition has, across multiple decades, been organized substantially around victim-category identification, and the rhetorical mobilization of those categories is a core feature of Democratic political strategy. Crucially, the progressive victim-narratives are largely false in their underlying premises. The categories of victim/oppressor that contemporary progressivism deploys often do not track real moral structure. Real injustices are recognized in the same breath as fictional ones; the framework’s claim to address oppression is undermined by its inability to distinguish actual oppression from imagined grievances, actual victims from manufactured ones. The captivity here is not just a posture toward real wrongs; it is a posture toward a world that does not exist as the framework describes it, and the captive lives inside the description rather than inside the world.

The conservative experience of grievance is structurally different. The conservative who feels that cultural elites are arrayed against him, that mainstream media misrepresents him, that the academy excludes him, that woke corporate America discriminates against him, that the deep state has been weaponized against him — is responding to grievances that have substantial truth-content. The cultural elites are arrayed against orthodox Christian conviction in ways that were not true thirty years ago. The mainstream media systematically misrepresents conservative positions. The academy has been ideologically captured to the point that orthodox views cannot be safely held in many disciplines. Woke corporate America does discriminate against employees who dissent from progressive cultural orthodoxy. The deep state has been weaponized against political opponents in documented ways. The grievances are real, and the conservative who refuses to acknowledge that they are real is not faithful — he is captured by the wood-cricket Christianity that cannot see what is plainly before its eyes.

The conservative failure with respect to this stronghold is therefore not the recognition of the grievances. The grievances are recognized rightly. The failure is in what is done with the recognition. Three failure modes are common.

The first failure is the captive’s organization of his identity around being-the-wronged-one. When the believer’s settled posture is they are doing things to me, when his primary self-knowledge is I am the one being acted upon, the captivity is real even though the underlying grievances may also be real. The recovery of sonship as primary identity is the corrective. The son is not a victim. The son is loved, equipped, and sent. Wrongs done to the son are addressed, not absorbed into the soul as identity.

The second failure is the substitution of grievance-recitation for action. The conservative who can articulate every cultural wrong with great precision but who has not built a single institution, has not raised a single child to speak boldly, has not organized a single neighbor for civic action, has not given sacrificially to a single restoration project, has converted the recognition of real wrongs into a permanent posture of complaint. The grievances are real. The complaint about them is not the response the moment requires.

The third failure is the misdirection of resentment from the spirits to the captured persons. The conservative who has come to resent his progressive neighbors as a class because the cultural revolution has captured them, who has begun to relate to them as enemies rather than as captives, has fallen into the same captivity Component Two of the Christos Civitas Code forbids: collapsing the distinction between the spirits that capture and the human beings captured. The grievances are real, and they are against the spirits. The captured progressive neighbor is not the enemy. He is the field on which the enemy operates. The conservative who has lost this distinction has, in effect, mirrored the progressive victim-narrative in the direction the progressive narrative has been pointing him: they are doing things to me, therefore they are the enemy. This is a real captivity that conservatives must repent of, even as they continue to recognize the real grievances that the framework rightly names.

The discipline of resistance, for the believer in any of these conditions: the recovery of sonship as primary identity. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son. The son addresses the wrongs done to him through the means available to a son in his Father’s house — prayer, righteous action, building, witnessing, raising children, organizing community, voting, and advocacy. He does not absorb the wrongs into his soul as identity. He does not substitute complaint for action. He does not extend his proper resistance to the spirits onto the human beings the spirits have captured. The grievances are real; the response is sonship.

Stronghold VII — Conceit, and the conservative failure of love alongside truth

Joan’s seventh item is conceit: she names the settled assumption among progressives that they are morally and intellectually superior to those they regard as cruel or unenlightened.

The progressive form of this stronghold is real, and Joan has named it accurately. It is the credentialed sneer that has become a recognizable feature of progressive cultural production: the assumption that the right to lecture the surrounding country about its moral failings comes by virtue of education, social positioning, and cultural placement, regardless of whether the lecture is grounded in actual wisdom or actual care for the country being lectured. The progressive captive of conceit positions himself as morally and intellectually superior on the basis of his cultural-tribe identification — I hold the views of the credentialed elite, therefore I am right, therefore those who disagree are stupid or evil — and the operative claim is grounded not in actual moral truth but in social positioning.

The biblical witness on conceit is consistent and severe. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18). Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits (Romans 12:16). God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble (James 4:6). The progressive captive of conceit is, by scriptural testimony, in active resistance from God. The position the captive occupies — above his neighbors by virtue of his cultural-tribe identification — is precisely the position God has reserved as His judicial response to the proud.

But here the asymmetry is at its sharpest. The conservative confidence in being right about the personhood of the unborn, the created order of marriage, the lordship of Christ, the apostolic deposit’s authority, the moral seriousness of work and family, and constitutional ordering — is not the conservative form of progressive conceit. It is not the same kind of move. The progressive conceit Joan named is a false claim of superiority grounded in cultural-tribe identification, in which the captive claims to be right because he holds the views of the credentialed elite. Conservative confidence in the apostolic deposit’s teachings is grounded in actual revealed truth and in natural-law reasoning that has been tested across millennia — not in cultural-tribe identification, not in social positioning, not in elite credentialing. The conservative is not claiming to be morally and intellectually superior because he is conservative; he is claiming that what is true is true, and that he confesses what is true.

The two postures have entirely different underlying structures. The progressive conceit collapses if its cultural-tribe positioning is removed; without the credentialing, the claim has no warrant. The conservative confession does not depend on cultural-tribal positioning at all; it depends on the apostolic deposit, the historic creedal tradition, natural-law reasoning, the witness of scripture, and the witness of conscience. The conservative who confidently confesses what scripture teaches is not in the same spiritual position as the progressive who claims superiority based on which views are currently held by the credentialed elite. To call the two postures mirror images, as my original draft did, was to flatten a real distinction that the framework cannot afford to flatten.

The conservative failure with respect to this stronghold is at a different level entirely. It is not that conservatives wrongly think they are right when, in fact, the question is open. It is that conservatives sometimes hold the rightness without the love that should accompany it. They speak the truth without speaking it in love. They confess the apostolic deposit accurately and engage the captured progressive contemptuously. They have the right confession and the wrong tone. Speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ (Ephesians 4:15). Both halves are required. The conservative who confesses the truth without love has done half the work, and the half he has done is corrupted by the half he has not done. This is a real failure mode, and conservatives must repent of it.

But this is also the place where the contemporary church must repent of the opposite failure — and this is where the asymmetry of the two failures must be honestly named. For every conservative who has spoken the truth without love, there are ten conservatives who have spoken neither, who have, out of fear of being called proud or contemptuous, declined to speak the truth at all. Those who have privatized their convictions. Who has decided that the cost of confessing what the apostolic deposit teaches is too high in mixed company. Who has substituted niceness for boldness and called the substitution love. Our supreme virtue has become not offending anyone. We call this ‘love,’ but it is cowardice dressed in religious language. This is the wood-cricket church the Suicidal Sympathy essay named, and it is the cardinal failure of contemporary Western Christianity. The conservative does not, in mainstream form, fail by being too confident that he is right. He fails because he is too cowardly to say what he believes is right. The proper corrective is not less confidence. It is the confidence held in love and spoken aloud — boldly, kindly, persistently, without shame, in the same breath as the love that animates it.

The discipline of resistance is therefore double. For the progressive captive of conceit: humility, the recognition that the cultural-tribe positioning that grounds the conceit is not an actual moral warrant, and repentance of the contempt for fellow image-bearers that the conceit has produced. For the conservative whose confidence has slid into contempt: repentance of the contempt while preserving the confidence in revealed truth. For the much larger group of conservatives whose confidence has slid into silence and niceness: recovery of the boldness the apostolic posture requires, speaking the truth in love with both halves operative — truth boldly confessed, love fiercely active — and never losing either to keep the other.

Stronghold VIII — Intolerance, and the conservative failure of overtolerance

Joan’s eighth item is intolerance: she identifies the cancel-culture phenomenon as the operating expression of a settled refusal to host disfavored views in the public square, with the concomitant working to remove their carriers from positions of cultural influence.

The progressive form of this stronghold is real, and Joan is right to name it. The cancel-culture phenomenon, the deplatforming campaigns, the corporate diversity-and-inclusion regimes that punish dissent from progressive cultural orthodoxy, the academic disciplines that have made the holding of orthodox Christian views professionally suicidal in many fields, the journalistic conventions that have made caricatures of conservative positions standard practice — these are all real institutional expressions of the spirit of intolerance that has captured substantial portions of contemporary progressive cultural production. The captive of progressive intolerance has decided that disfavored views are themselves a kind of social violence requiring suppression, and that the proper response to disagreement is not engagement but elimination.

The biblical witness against this captivity is plain. Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not (Romans 12:14). Recompense to no man evil for evil (Romans 12:17). Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). The Christian response to being canceled is not to cancel back; the Christian response to being maligned is to bless. This is not pacifism in the political sense — the believer can resist unjust legal or institutional regimes through every legitimate means, can defend himself in court, can build alternative institutions where the existing institutions have been captured. What he cannot do is return cancel for cancel, because that is to conform to the very stronghold that has captured his opponent.

But again, the asymmetry must be insisted upon, and here it is at its most consequential.

Progressive cancel culture and conservative resistance to ideological capture are not mirror operations. They have entirely different structural logics, and treating them as equivalent is a category error that the framework cannot afford to make. Progressive cancel culture seeks to silence orthodox views — to remove them from public discourse, to make them professionally costly to hold, to treat their expression as itself a form of harm. Conservative resistance to ideological capture seeks the opposite: to restore the conditions under which orthodox views can be heard, to defend the public square as a space where disfavored views can be expressed without professional or social annihilation, to push back against the silencing operations that have captured institutions one by one over decades. One operation silences truth; the other restores public space for truth. They are not mirror images. They are inverse operations.

There are, to be sure, real failure modes in conservative discourse. Some conservative activists have, in some cases, built mirror cancel-operations targeting progressive cultural figures — the public-shaming campaigns, the boycotts, the celebration of professional destruction visited on a progressive opponent. These failures are real, and they should be named. The believer recognizes them for what they are and refuses to participate in them, even when the targeting is being directed at someone he would otherwise have reasons to oppose. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. But this is a smaller failure mode than the broader conservative resistance, and treating the broader resistance as if it were itself an instance of cancel culture in mirror form misclassifies the resistance and disarms the church at the moment when the church most needs to be armed.

The much larger conservative failure with respect to this stronghold is the opposite of intolerance. It is overtolerance — the wood-cricket failure to recognize what is happening, the parasitized-mind failure to say plainly what is true, the Christian who cannot say Islam is false even when Islam is actually false, the believer who flag-flies progressive cultural orthodoxy in his own home because he is afraid of being thought intolerant, the church that has substituted niceness for holiness and tolerance for truth. This is the captivity of the contemporary church, and it is the captivity that has positioned us where we now stand: passive in the face of an aggressive ideology that worships a false god and is actively working to impose its worship upon us, lukewarm in the defense of the apostolic deposit, neither cold nor hot, fit only to be spit out (Revelation 3:15-16).

This is the cardinal sin of the Western church in our generation, and the framework cannot pretend otherwise.

The fire that the adversary has, misdirected as it is, must be matched and exceeded by the fire of those who know the living God. I came to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled? (Luke 12:49). The believer who has been told that orthodox confession is itself a form of intolerance has been told a lie, and the lie has captured significant portions of the contemporary Western church. The corrective is not to mirror the silencing operations of the cultural revolution. It is to recover the boldness that the apostolic posture requires: to say what is true, plainly, without apology, in love, with the willingness to bear whatever costs the saying produces. Be ye angry, and sin not. Speaking the truth in love. Bless them which persecute you — but say it. Recompense to no man evil for evil — but do not let the refusal of evil-for-evil become the cowardice of saying nothing at all. Overcome evil with good — but the good must be overcoming, not merely passive.

The conservative who has built a mirror cancel-operation must repent of it. This is real, and the discipline is appropriate. But the much larger conservative — the wood-cricket Christian who has gone silent in the face of the cultural revolution, who has suicide-empathied himself into ineffectiveness, who has taught his children to be polite and nice in the face of an enemy that is actively working to capture them, who has made truce with the culture and forgotten that we are at war — must repent of the opposite failure. He must recover the fire. He must learn, again, what the early martyrs knew, what the Otranto martyrs knew when they refused to convert at the cost of their lives, what the Confessing Church knew under National Socialism, what the believers under communist persecution knew in the gulags: that some things are worth saying out loud regardless of cost, that the truth is worth the boldness it requires, that the love that loves God and loves neighbor is fierce, willing to suffer, unashamed, active, and will not let the captives go without having said clearly that the Christ they need is the Christ we confess.

The discipline of resistance is double here as well. For the progressive captive of intolerance: turn from the silencing of those you disagree with, repent of treating disfavored views as social violence, and learn to host disagreement as the public square requires. For the conservative who has built mirror cancel-operations: turn from them, recompense no man evil for evil, overcome evil with good. For the much larger group of conservatives whose failure is overtolerance and silence: recover the fire. Speak boldly. Be not ashamed of the testimony of our Lord (2 Timothy 1:8). The hour is late. The captives need to hear it.

What Joan was reaching for, and what the framework offers her

I have engaged Joan’s inventory with the eight strongholds because the inventory she produced, once relocated to its proper level, is genuinely useful. She cataloged eight characteristic operating modes of demonic captivity in the contemporary moment. Her error was not in the cataloging; the cataloging is, on its surface, accurate. Her error was in the level at which the captivities were located — at the level of Democrats as a tribal class rather than at the level of spirits that capture human beings. The patterns Joan saw are real. The Democratic Party, as an institutionalized movement, has, by deliberate strategy across multiple decades, made itself a vehicle for several of these spirits. This is empirically observable; it is not a partisan caricature. The institutional accountability the framework requires us to name is real, and on the question of which strongholds the Democratic Party has cultivated, Joan’s analysis has correctly identified.

What this framework adds is the asymmetric-orientation principle. Both progressives and conservatives are subject to unholy spirits, but the spirits are not the same, and the spiritual conditions they produce are not symmetric. The Democratic Party has cultivated spirits that operate in active rebellion against God’s order — the strongholds Joan named. The orientation of that movement is toward false gods. The conservative movement, by contrast, is in its mainstream form oriented correctly toward the right God; its failures, when they appear, are failures of execution within a fundamentally correct orientation rather than failures of orientation itself.

The conservative does not need to repent of his confession that the unborn child is a person, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that Christ is Lord, and that the constitutional ordering protects what Scripture commands the state to protect. He needs, in many cases, to repent of his lukewarmness in defending what he confesses, of his niceness-as-cowardice in the face of cultural attack, of his expectation that elected leaders will deliver the cultural restoration that only personal-family-community spiritual transformation can deliver, of his hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage that consume his energy without channeling it into righteous action. These are real failures. They are not the same failures as the progressive captive’s. Different correctives. Different conditions. Both unholy. Not the same.

The cardinal failure of the Western church in our generation is overtolerance and lukewarmness in the face of an aggressive ideology — the ideology of the cultural revolution at home, and the ideology of resurgent political Islam abroad — that is actively working to dispossess us of our God, our heritage, our institutions, and our children. We have substituted niceness for holiness, tolerance for truth, attendance for devotion, and doctrine for fire. We have laid down our weapons. We have made a truce with the enemy. We have forgotten that we are at war. I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth (Revelation 3:15–16). The framework can name this with the same honesty it names progressive captivity, and it must, because without naming it, the framework will not produce the correctives the contemporary church most needs.

The fire that the adversary has, misdirected as it is, must be matched and exceeded by the fire of those who know the living God. Passionate as the Muslims are passionate — but for the true God. Devoted as the Muslims are devoted — but to Christ. Uncompromising as the Muslims are, but on the truth. Willing to die as the Muslims are willing to die, but for the Gospel. This is not a call to hatred. It is a call to love so fierce it cannot tolerate the destruction of those we love, love so strong it will speak truth regardless of cost, love so deep it would rather die than see souls go to hell unreached. We must speak the truth in love. We must not let the sun go down on our wrath. We must live in His peace as a resting state alongside the focused, time-limited, action-channeled outrage at evil that the moment requires. We must love the captives. The captured are not the enemy. The captured are the field on which the enemy operates, and our task is to rescue them, not to destroy them.

To Joan, if she ever sees this: I support the spirit of your column. The patterns you observed in contemporary Democratic Party rhetoric and policy are real. The substantive concerns about the genocidal-violence question regarding Hamas, about the historical record of the Democratic Party on civil rights, about the dependency structures created by progressive policy designs, about the cultural revolution operating through institutional channels — these are concerns I share, and the column’s substantive analysis on these points reflects reality. What the framework asks, with your inventory, is to relocate the diagnosis from the level of Democrats to the level of spirits that capture human beings and institutions that function as vehicles for those spirits. The patterns you saw are real; some of them have made the Democratic Party a deliberate institutional vehicle for them. Conservatives also have failures in the same stronghold areas, but the failures are of a different kind and require different corrective measures. The framework keeps the asymmetry honest. The conservative does not need to repent of being a conservative; he needs, in many cases, to recover the fire that orthodox conservatism requires.

To the fellowship: this is what the framework looks like applied to a piece of polemical conservative cultural commentary, with the asymmetric-orientation principle preserved. The substantive concerns that animated the column are not abandoned. They are relocated, named more precisely, and addressed in a way that honors what is true while naming what is incomplete in how the truth has been held. We hate the spirits. We love the captured on every side. We listen carefully. We speak boldly. We refuse to be assimilated into either the captivity of false-god worship that has captured the progressive movement or the captivity of lukewarmness and niceness-as-cowardice that has captured significant portions of the contemporary church. We hold our convictions firmly and our relationships open. We recover the fire. One heart to make Christ King.

Thomas

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” — Ephesians 6:12

“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” — Revelation 3:15–16

“I came to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” — Luke 12:49

“Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” — Romans 12:21

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

260428 Denver Snuffer – Series 4/4 – Evangelization of Christians

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Front Porch That Becomes the Closed Door

A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Addresses to All Christians (2017–2025, Nine Addresses)

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer, Addresses to All Christians (Cerritos California 2017, Dallas Texas 2017, Atlanta Georgia 2017, Sandy Utah 2018 fourth, Sandy Utah 2018 fifth, Sandy Utah 2018 sixth, Boise Idaho 2018 seventh, Montgomery Alabama 2019 eighth, and Philippines 2025 ninth — recorded August 2025 for the Philippines Covenant Christians Conference). Available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html. The series is the fourth and final corpus-defining lecture series I am engaging in the systematic Snuffer treatment.

Context: This is the sixth Snuffer engagement in the corpus and the fourth in the systematic four-series treatment. The companion essays so far are: Culture by Precept and Practice (April 26), Testimony of Jesus and the Restoration Claim (April 27), Upon This Rock (April 28), Reformation Series (April 28), Christian Restoration Series (April 28), and Christian Restoration Continues Series (April 28). With the present essay the systematic engagement is complete.

To the Fellowship —

The fourth and final Snuffer corpus is different in genre from the first three. Where Reformation, Christian Restoration, and Christian Restoration Continues were each a tightly-organized seven-part lecture cycle delivered to internal audiences, the Addresses to All Christians are nine standalone evangelistic talks given to (or recorded for) general Christian audiences across an eight-year span — Cerritos September 2017, Dallas October 2017, Atlanta November 2017, Sandy Utah September 2018 (multiple addresses), Boise November 2018, Montgomery Alabama May 2019, and the Philippines (recorded) August 2025. Each address is freestanding. Each opens with a thank-you to volunteers, an explicit no-collection-plate disclaimer, an invitation to learnofchrist.org, a recitation of the doctrine of Christ as preserved in 3 Nephi 11, and a closing invitation to be baptized at bornofwater.org by men who claim restored apostolic authority.

Reading the corpus as a whole, what emerges most clearly is an arc. The Cerritos and Dallas and Atlanta addresses of 2017 are warm, ecumenical, wide-armed. Snuffer praises C.S. Lewis at length, cites Mother Teresa and St. Francis appreciatively, says he believes authentic Christians can be found in every denomination, names Father Ordway and his friend Rick’s mother Mary as Catholic witnesses with real holiness, and explicitly invites Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and others to fellowship together with him on the basis of shared belief in the simple doctrine of Christ. The 2018 and 2019 addresses extend this generosity through long expositions on the diversity of early Christianity, the compromises of post-Constantinian creedal orthodoxy, and the wisdom of various Christian witnesses across the centuries. By the 2025 Philippines address, however, the wide-armed ecumenism has been replaced by a different posture: historic Christian baptism is declared invalid, re-baptism by men holding restored authority is required of every Christian listener including those previously baptized in the LDS Church, and the historic creedal traditions are dismissed (in Snuffer’s characterization echoing the 1820 First Vision narrative) as the philosophies of men mingled with scripture, with their practitioners likened to those who crucified the Lord.

This is the arc the essay needs to engage. The front porch of 2017 leads, by 2025, to the closed door of all your previous baptisms are invalid; submit to ours. The warmth at the front of the corpus and the closure at the back are not in tension — they are the same evangelistic strategy unfolding over time. The wide-armed welcome was the first move; the call to submission to a specific authority is the destination. This is worth naming carefully, with respect for what is genuine in the welcome and clarity about where the welcome was leading.

I will engage the corpus in six movements. First, what is honorable in the addresses, particularly in their pastoral tone and their substantive Christian witness on certain subjects. Second, the arc of progressive narrowing across the eight years. Third, three doctrinal engagements that need direct response: the early-Christianity-was-diverse argument, the Gethsemane-substitution theology elaborated in the Atlanta address, and the Book-of-Mormon-as-hermeneutical-key claim. Fourth, the Daniel 2 stone-cut-without-hands eschatology that organizes the Sandy 2018 addresses. Fifth, the 2025 Philippines address as the corpus’s culmination and the place where the framework’s exclusivity becomes most explicit. Sixth, pastoral closing — to Leonard, to anyone reading toward bornofwater.org, and to the fellowship.

I. What Is Honorable in the Addresses

The Addresses to All Christians contain genuine Christian substance that deserves to be acknowledged before the structural critique begins.

1. The witness to Christ’s resurrection. Every address in the corpus testifies clearly and centrally to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the foundation of Christian hope. The Cerritos address contains a particularly moving treatment of the disciples’ transformation from cowardice to courage on the first day of the week, observing that the men who had cowered at the trial were transformed by the resurrection into men willing to die for the testimony that Christ was risen. The Philippines address closes with a personal testimony from Snuffer about his childhood friend Waldo who died at age eleven in a bicycle accident, and the comfort that flows from knowing he will see Waldo again. These are not the words of a man who does not love Christ. The witness to the resurrection is real, sincere, and Christian in its substance. This deserves recognition.

2. The honest treatment of Christianity’s institutional failures. Snuffer’s diagnosis of what happens to Christian movements when they acquire money, buildings, professional clergy, and political influence is, on the merits, accurate and worth hearing. He observes that as soon as a church owns a building, the cares of this world necessarily invade — title questions, incorporation questions, tax questions, board governance, succession, the hire-and-fire of clergy. This is the truth. Religious institutions develop their own institutional self-interest that competes with the spiritual interest of the believers they exist to serve. Snuffer’s challenge to take the money out of religion, to gather tithes and use them for the poor among the fellowship rather than for clerical compensation and capital projects, is closer to the practice of the New Testament church described in Acts 2 and Acts 4 than what most contemporary Christian institutions actually do. This is a genuine prophetic challenge to Christianity, and it should be received as such.

3. The pastoral generosity in the early addresses. The Cerritos, Dallas, and Atlanta addresses are wide-armed in a way that is genuinely admirable. Snuffer says explicitly that he thinks you can find authentic Christians in every denomination. He praises C.S. Lewis. He names Mother Teresa and St. Francis. Of his Catholic friend Rick’s mother Mary, he describes seeing in her that fire of belief, that devotion — naming the recognition of authentic faith across a tradition very different from his own. He describes the Christian goal as a coming-together in unity of faith, accomplished not by coercion but by the persuasion that comes when truth resonates as truth. This is generous. It is also the front porch of the larger evangelistic strategy, but the generosity at the porch is real and not merely a manipulation.

4. The treatment of the Sermon on the Mount as the law of Christian community. Across the corpus, Snuffer returns repeatedly to Matthew 5–7 as the law that should govern Christian life. The Boise 2018 address contains a particularly substantive meditation on St. Francis’s literal practice of the Sermon on the Mount — giving away the only coat in winter, founding the Franciscans on poverty and service. The Montgomery 2019 address develops the Sermon on the Mount as Christ’s intensification of the Law of Moses — the point being that mere outward refraining from killing and adultery is not enough; what Christ commands is the transformation of the heart from which those acts arise. This is sound exegesis. The Sermon on the Mount as the constitution of Christian community is closer to the apostolic deposit’s vision of what Christianity is about than the doctrinal warfare and credalism that has too often dominated Christian history.

5. The diagnosis of LDS institutional drift. Snuffer’s unsparing critique of the contemporary LDS Church — its tens of billions of dollars of liquid assets, its hundred-thousand-acre Florida real estate development, its corporate transformation, its abandonment of much of what Joseph Smith originally taught, its claim to be God’s vehicle for salvation while behaving structurally like every other wealthy religious institution — is honest in a way that very few public observers, inside or outside Mormonism, are willing to be. The fact that Snuffer tells this truth carries weight, and the truth is worth hearing regardless of the framework within which he tells it.

These five things are honorable. They deserve to be honored. The structural critique that follows does not undo any of them.

II. The Arc of Progressive Narrowing

The most striking structural feature of the corpus is its arc.

In Cerritos September 2017, Snuffer’s posture is invitational. He explicitly invites the audience to participate with his movement in worshipping Christ and practicing His doctrine, and he characterizes his movement’s authority as something that is not jealously guarded but freely shared with any man willing to accept and follow the doctrine of Christ. The implicit claim is that authentic Christians from any tradition can fellowship together on the basis of shared faith in Christ.

In Dallas October 2017, the same posture continues. Re-baptism is offered as an opportunity for those who would like to receive it from authorized administrants, without charge — but as opportunity, not requirement.

In Atlanta November 2017, the wide-armed welcome continues but the doctrinal content becomes more aggressive. The extended Gethsemane-substitution vision is delivered as Snuffer’s own first-person witness. The Origen-and-Johannine-pre-existence argument is made. The seven streams of early Christianity (Pauline, Matthean, Johannine, Petrine, Gnostic, Syriac, Thomas) are named to support the claim that Mormon doctrine recovers what was lost when the Petrine stream consolidated power.

In the Sandy Utah 2018 addresses (the fourth, fifth, and sixth in the corpus chronology), the focus shifts decisively to the Book of Mormon as the interpretive key for Christianity itself. The fifth address argues that any Christian who wishes to escape the eschatological destruction of the Babylonian-influenced great image must take the Book of Mormon seriously as the ensign of truth planted by God for the last days. The argument is no longer that Baptists and Methodists and Catholics can fellowship together with Snuffer’s people. The argument is that all Christians need to receive the Book of Mormon as their hermeneutical key.

The sixth address (Sandy 2018) hardens this further. Snuffer there places every Christian who declines to receive the Book of Mormon in the moral position of those who crucified Christ — likening them to those who gave lip-service to a false and inadequate religion and rejected the Messiah Himself. This is the sharpest single rhetorical move in the entire corpus. The wide-armed welcome of 2017 has, by this point in 2018, narrowed into a specific demand that comes with a specific anathema attached.

In Boise November 2018, the gathering-all-things-in-one-in-Christ theme is developed in a way that reaches outward to Hindus and Buddhists — Snuffer claiming that the highest aspirations and ideals of both traditions are present in the gospel of Christ. This sounds expansive but functions as a different kind of narrowing: the only frame within which all these traditions can be gathered is in Christ, and the only access to that gathering point Snuffer is presenting is through his own movement’s recovery of the doctrine of Christ as preserved in 3 Nephi.

In Montgomery May 2019, the corpus turns autobiographical. Snuffer recounts his own conversion, his decades in the LDS Church, his excommunication, his work as a Mormon historian, his conviction that Joseph Smith was an authentic Christian, and his current movement’s practice. The address ends with an extended argument that Joseph Smith’s life and writings — particularly the Liberty Jail letter — bear witness to authentic Christian sanctity equivalent to St. Francis’s. The reader is being invited to accept Joseph Smith specifically as the prophet through whom Primitive Christianity has been restored.

By the Philippines address of August 2025, the corpus reaches its destination. The Trinity is named directly as a stumbling block. The historic creeds are dismissed as the philosophies of men mingled with scripture, with their practitioners doing what Joseph Smith was told in his 1820 First Vision narrative was an abomination. All previous baptisms — including LDS Church baptisms — are declared invalid and in need of being redone by people holding restored authority. The wide-armed welcome of 2017 has, by 2025, become a call to be re-baptized by Snuffer’s movement on the grounds that no one else has the authority required.

This arc is not accidental. It is the structure of the evangelistic appeal. The wide-armed welcome was the entry point. The closed door of 2025 was the destination. The reader who entered the conversation through the front porch of Cerritos 2017, expecting fellowship across denominational lines, finds by 2025 that the only fellowship offered is the fellowship of submission to a specific restored authority claim that historic Christianity has had no grounds for accepting. The generosity at the front of the corpus is genuine. The narrowing at the back is also genuine. They are not contradictory; they are the same strategy, deployed across time.

Naming this arc is, I think, the single most useful service the present essay can perform. Anyone reading the Addresses to All Christians needs to read all nine addresses to see the arc. The reader who reads only Cerritos 2017 and stops there will form a picture of Snuffer’s project that the 2025 Philippines address contradicts. The reader who reads only the 2025 Philippines address will miss the genuine pastoral generosity of 2017. Both are real. Both belong to the same project. The arc is what tells you what the project is.

III. Three Doctrinal Engagements

Three substantive doctrinal claims in the corpus deserve direct engagement on their own merits.

1. The Early-Christianity-Was-Diverse Argument

Across the Atlanta and Boise addresses, Snuffer elaborates an argument that early Christianity was originally diverse — Pauline, Matthean, Johannine, Petrine, Gnostic, Syriac, Thomas — and that this diversity was natural, healthy, and intended by Christ until the Constantinian unification at Nicaea imposed a false orthodoxy that crushed legitimate alternative streams. Snuffer leans heavily on Bart Ehrman’s scholarship to argue that the New Testament text itself was corrupted during the proto-orthodox consolidation.

There is a real historical observation underneath this argument that should be acknowledged. The first century church was, in fact, more theologically diverse in its expression than later patristic orthodoxy. Different communities did emphasize different teachings and traditions. The patristic age did involve serious theological debate and consolidation. Bart Ehrman’s text-critical scholarship documents real variations in the New Testament manuscript tradition.

But the historical observation does not support the theological conclusion Snuffer draws. The diversity of early Christian expression existed within a substantial unity of confession. Paul and Peter sometimes disagreed sharply (Galatians 2 records Paul’s confrontation with Peter at Antioch), but they agreed on the centralities — Christ crucified and risen for sins, the gospel proclaimed to the nations, the church as Christ’s body. Snuffer treats these disagreements as evidence that early Christianity had no rule of faith. The historic Christian position is that there was a rule of faith from the beginning — what Jude 3 calls the faith which was once delivered unto the saints — and that the patristic creedal articulation was the church’s defense of that rule of faith against teachings (Arianism, Gnosticism, Docetism, Marcionism) that actually contradicted it.

The Gnostic streams that Snuffer mentions appreciatively — the ones that taught hidden knowledge accessible only to initiates, that rejected the goodness of material creation, that denied the full incarnation of Christ — were not legitimate alternative Christianities that the Petrine consolidation unjustly crushed. They were teachings the apostles themselves explicitly rejected. The First Letter of John was written substantially against early proto-Gnostic teaching: every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God (1 John 4:3). Paul’s letter to the Colossians addressed similar teachings: Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men (Colossians 2:8). The patristic consolidation against Gnosticism was not an unjust narrowing of legitimate diversity; it was the church doing what the apostles told it to do.

Bart Ehrman’s text-critical work, similarly, does not support the theological conclusion Snuffer draws. Ehrman documents real variants in the manuscript tradition, but the variants are mostly minor (spelling, word order, scribal harmonizations) and the substantive doctrines of the New Testament are not at risk from textual variation. No major Christian doctrine depends on a contested text. The text we have is, by any honest standard of ancient document transmission, exceptionally well attested. Ehrman himself acknowledges this in his more careful scholarly works (as opposed to his popular polemical books). Snuffer uses Ehrman’s documented variants to argue that the Christian faith is so textually compromised that we need a new and more reliable revelation — a conclusion Ehrman himself does not draw and which the textual evidence does not support.

The diversity-of-early-Christianity argument is, in the end, a rhetorical move that uses a real historical observation to license a theological conclusion the observation does not support. The observation: early Christianity had genuine theological variety. The conclusion: therefore historic Christian orthodoxy is illegitimate consolidation, and Mormon scripture restores what was lost. The logical gap between observation and conclusion is wide enough to drive a truck through.

2. The Gethsemane-Substitution Theology

The Atlanta November 2017 address contains the most theologically distinctive single passage in the entire Snuffer corpus. Snuffer presents an extended first-person account of an alleged vision experienced in February 2005 and December 2007, in which he saw Christ suffering in Gethsemane in waves of vicarious atonement — first absorbing the experiential horror of those who commit sin, then absorbing the experiential horror of the victims of those sins, with each pair of waves greater than the last, culminating in physical wounds opening at every pore from the cumulative weight.

The passage is extraordinary as a piece of religious writing. Whatever else may be said about it, it is sincere, vivid, and pastorally serious. It clearly reflects genuine spiritual experience of some kind on Snuffer’s part. I am not in a position to adjudicate the visionary claim; that is between Snuffer and God. What I can engage is the theological content of what the passage teaches about atonement.

The theological content locates the price of atonement specifically and primarily in Gethsemane rather than at the Cross. Snuffer concludes the passage by stating directly that Christ’s death on the cross was not where the price for sin was paid. He observes that many men have died similarly in Roman crucifixions, and that what made Christ’s atonement unique was that He alone could absorb the burden of mankind’s sin — a burden, on Snuffer’s account, that was carried in Gethsemane rather than at Calvary. The Cross becomes a necessary subsequent step (because Christ had to die to break the bonds of death by resurrection), but the atoning work itself was completed in Gethsemane.

This is a Mormon-distinctive theology of atonement. It is not the theology of the New Testament. The apostolic deposit consistently and emphatically locates the atoning work at the Cross. Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3). We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins (Ephesians 1:7). Made peace through the blood of his cross (Colossians 1:20). Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood (Romans 3:24–25). Without shedding of blood is no remission (Hebrews 9:22). The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin (1 John 1:7). Worthy is the Lamb that was slain (Revelation 5:12). The blood, the cross, the death — these are where the apostolic deposit locates atonement. Gethsemane is the place where Christ accepted the cup; the Cross is the place where He drank it.

The Gethsemane-substitution theology has another problem: it is in tension with the phenomenology of the Cross insight that has emerged in this very fellowship’s recent work (the April 25 essay developed Thomas’s articulation of the Cross as the place where God’s own experiential recoil against sin was absorbed by the only Being who could survive absorbing it). The Cross is morally and theologically central to the Christian gospel because it is there — at the place where the sinless Son hangs in the agony of the world’s sin — that the atoning work is done. To relocate the atoning work to Gethsemane is to lose the iconic centrality of the Cross to the gospel. It is to displace what Paul calls the word of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18) from the center of Christian preaching.

I do not say this to question the sincerity of Snuffer’s reported visionary experience. I say it because the doctrinal content of what is reported as a vision contradicts the doctrinal content of the apostolic deposit, and on a question of this importance, the apostolic deposit must govern. Galatians 1:8 stands: though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. The gospel preached by the apostles locates atonement at the Cross. A vision that relocates atonement to Gethsemane, however vivid, is not the gospel the apostles preached.

3. The Book-of-Mormon-as-Hermeneutical-Key Claim

The Sandy 2018 fifth address contains the most aggressive single argument in the entire Snuffer corpus, and it deserves direct engagement.

Snuffer adopts Walter Martin’s hermeneutical principle that you interpret the old in light of the new — meaning, in Martin’s original use, that the New Testament’s interpretation of Old Testament prophecy governs Christian reading of those passages. Snuffer turns this principle on Christianity itself: the Book of Mormon, as the latest-in-time text of public availability (1830), becomes the interpretive key for both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Sandy 2018 sixth address sharpens this into the anathema characterized in the Section II discussion above — placing every Christian who declines the Book of Mormon in the moral position of those who crucified Christ.

Walter Martin would not have agreed with this extension of his principle, and the extension is theologically illegitimate. Martin’s principle assumed a closed canon. The New Testament can govern interpretation of the Old Testament because the New Testament is part of the same revelation — given by the same Spirit, through the same prophetic-apostolic line, to the same covenant people. The Book of Mormon is not part of that revelation. Its claim to be is precisely what is at issue. To use Martin’s principle to elevate the Book of Mormon over the New Testament is to assume what needs to be proven: that the Book of Mormon belongs in the same revelatory category as the apostolic deposit.

The apostolic deposit is closed. I beseech you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3) — the once (Greek hapax, meaning once for all) is decisive. The pattern of new revelation through new scripture, on the apostolic deposit’s own internal logic, ended with the closing of the apostolic age. New revelations are not impossible (the Spirit speaks personally to believers in every generation, leading them into the truth already deposited), but new scripture is. The scriptural deposit is what the Spirit is leading believers into, not adding to.

Snuffer’s likening of Christians who reject the Book of Mormon to those who crucified the Lord is the sharpest expression of the framework’s exclusivity in any of the four series. It is also, on examination, exactly backwards. Those who crucified the Lord rejected the Lord. Christians who reject the Book of Mormon are not rejecting the Lord; they are protecting the Lord’s gospel from supplementation by claimed revelations the apostolic deposit gave no warrant to expect. The proper Christian posture toward any post-apostolic claim of new scripture is to test the spirits, as the apostle John commanded. When the test is applied — does the new claim agree with the apostolic deposit, or does it contradict the apostolic deposit at structural points? — the Book of Mormon, on the deposit’s own standard, fails the test. Its anthropology (premortal spirit existence), its theology proper (multiple gods), its Christology (the Father and Son as separate exalted beings), its soteriology (salvation requiring valid restored ordinances administered by men holding restored authority) — each of these contradicts the apostolic deposit at structural points. The Christian who rejects the Book of Mormon is not crucifying the Lord; the Christian is doing what the apostolic deposit commanded the Christian to do.

The sharpness of the Sandy 2018 sixth address’s anathema actually inverts the relationship Snuffer needs. Far from showing that Christians who reject the Book of Mormon are like those who rejected Christ, it shows that the framework cannot tolerate disagreement at its load-bearing point. A framework that anathematizes those who decline its core claim is a framework that needs the core claim accepted in order to function. The apostolic deposit needs no such anathema, because the deposit is its own evidence — its historical credentials, its doctrinal coherence, its twenty centuries of attested fruit — and disagreement with it does not threaten its standing. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, must be accepted on faith and cannot tolerate the test.

IV. The Daniel 2 Stone-Cut-Without-Hands Eschatology

The Sandy 2018 fourth and fifth addresses are organized around an extended reading of Daniel 2 — Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great image with the head of gold, shoulders of silver, belly of brass, legs of iron, feet of iron mingled with clay, and the stone cut out of the mountain without hands that grinds the image to dust.

Snuffer’s reading is that the head of gold (Babylon) influenced the religion of Israel during the Babylonian captivity, that the subsequent kingdoms (Medo-Persian, Greek, Roman) progressively corrupted the religion, and that Christianity itself emerged within this corrupted milieu and inherited the corruption. The Book of Mormon, on this reading, represents an uninfluenced preservation of authentic religion from a community (the Lehi-Nephi colony of approximately 600 BC) that left Jerusalem before the Babylonian captivity and was therefore never subject to the post-exilic corruption. The Book of Mormon is therefore the stone cut without hands — the recovery of pre-Babylonian religion that will, in the last days, grind the post-Babylonian-corrupted religious-cultural-economic-governmental system to dust.

This reading is structurally similar to the Reformation-series Daniel 2 reading I engaged in the April 28 Reformation essay, but it is more elaborated and load-bearing here. Three observations.

First, the historic Christian reading of Daniel 2 has consistently identified the stone cut without hands as Christ Himself and His kingdom — established at His first coming, growing throughout history through the proclamation of the gospel, and finally consummated at His return in glory. This is the reading of the patristic commentators (Hippolytus, Jerome, Theodoret, Augustine), the medieval commentators, the Reformers, and the bulk of contemporary Christian scholarship. Christ as the stone cut without human hands fits the text precisely: He was conceived without a human father (cut without hands), born of David’s line (out of the mountain), small at His coming (the stone), and His kingdom is the one that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). The Christian reading does not require a future restored religion to fulfill the prophecy because the prophecy was fulfilled at Christ’s first coming.

Second, the historical claim that the Book of Mormon represents an uninfluenced preservation of pre-Babylonian religion is not testable in the way Snuffer needs it to be. The Book of Mormon as a published text dates from 1830 and bears the marks of the early-19th-century Protestant religious world from which it emerged — including, on careful reading, substantial echoes of the King James Bible’s English (which is a 1611 translation), of contemporary debates about infant baptism and the doctrine of the Trinity, of Methodist and Campbellite revival theology, and of other features of its actual provenance. The claim that its content reflects pre-Babylonian Hebrew religion is not a historical claim that can be checked against the evidence; it is a faith claim that requires acceptance of Joseph Smith’s prophetic authenticity as its prior. We are, again, at the theology that begins after the step not taken.

Third, even granting Snuffer’s reading of the historical chronology, the conclusion that the Book of Mormon is the stone cut without hands does not follow. The text of Daniel 2 specifies that the stone fills the whole earth and replaces all the kingdoms — the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). The Book of Mormon as a published text has not done this. It has produced, by Snuffer’s own honest catalog in the Christian Restoration and Christian Restoration Continues series, a movement that splintered into approximately a hundred mutually-anathematizing factions within two centuries of its publication. The largest of those factions (LDS) has, by Snuffer’s account, fallen into the same Babylonian corruption Snuffer charges historic Christianity with. The smallest of those factions (Snuffer’s own movement) is, by his own admission, very small — Snuffer himself describes the worldwide movement as a small body of believers scattered across Japan, Europe, Australia, and Canada. The Book of Mormon has not filled the earth. It has not destroyed the kingdoms. It has not done what Daniel 2:44 says the stone will do. By the very text Snuffer cites, the Book of Mormon is not the stone cut without hands.

The Christian reading of Daniel 2 — the stone is Christ Himself, His first coming inaugurated the kingdom, the kingdom has been growing for twenty centuries through the gospel’s proclamation, and the consummation will come at His return — fits the text. The Snuffer reading does not.

V. The 2025 Philippines Address

The Philippines address (recorded August 2025 for the September 2025 Philippines Covenant Christians Conference) is the corpus’s destination, and it deserves direct engagement as such.

The address contains four moves that, taken together, constitute the sharpest expression of the Snuffer framework’s exclusivity in the entire corpus.

First move: the Trinity is named directly as a stumbling block. The Philippines address presents the historic Christian Trinitarian doctrine as something the original disciples of Jesus could not have understood — alleging that the three-in-one and one-in-three formulation is foreign to the apostolic witness. The doctrine is presented as a philosophical imposition that obscures the plain biblical witness to the Father and Son as two separate beings. The Christian observation: the doctrine of the Trinity was not the imposition of post-apostolic philosophy on a simpler apostolic teaching; it was the church’s necessary articulation of what the apostolic witness actually said when the witness was tested against unitarian and modalist alternatives. Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord (Deuteronomy 6:4). In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (John 1:1). I and my Father are one (John 10:30). Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (Matthew 28:19). The Trinitarian articulation arose because the apostolic deposit said all of these things and the church had to confess what they all together meant. Snuffer’s preferred unitarian-with-Son reading flattens the witness rather than confessing it.

Second move: all historic Christian baptism is invalidated, including LDS baptism. Asked directly in the question-and-answer session whether someone previously baptized in a Christian church needs to be re-baptized, Snuffer answers unambiguously that all such baptisms need to be redone by men holding restored authority from his own movement. The Christian observation: this is the framework reaching its destination. Every previous baptism — every Catholic baptism, every Lutheran baptism, every Baptist baptism, every Methodist baptism, every Presbyterian baptism, every Eastern Orthodox baptism, every LDS baptism — is declared invalid. The only valid baptism is one administered by men holding the authority Snuffer’s movement claims to have received. This is the closed door at the end of the front porch.

Third move: the historic creeds are framed as abomination. The address quotes Joseph Smith’s 1820 First Vision narrative in which Christ allegedly told the young Joseph that all the historic Christian creeds were an abomination. This characterization is then applied to the present-day Christian world: anyone holding to the historic creeds is holding to what Christ Himself declared abominable. The Christian observation: the historic creeds — the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition — are the church’s confession of what the apostolic deposit teaches about God, Christ, the Spirit, and salvation. They were not produced by speculative philosophy; they were produced by the church’s defense of the apostolic deposit against teachings that contradicted it. To call them an abomination is to call the apostolic deposit’s faithful articulation an abomination. This is not a position the apostolic deposit can support.

Fourth move: the simplicity-versus-philosophy framing. Snuffer presents Primitive Christianity as simple, plain, accessible to uneducated people, and the historic Christian creeds as the corruption of that simplicity by educated philosophers. This is a familiar restorationist trope and it has surface appeal — but it is unfair to the historical reality. The patristic articulation of orthodoxy was not the work of philosophers imposing speculation on simple faith; it was the work of pastors and bishops defending simple faith against philosophical heresies. The Arian controversy was provoked by Arius, who had imported Hellenistic subordinationist categories into the doctrine of God. Athanasius’s defense of Nicene orthodoxy was the simpler position, and the more biblical position — the Word was God (John 1:1), without subordination, without graded divinity. Snuffer’s framing reverses the historical reality.

The Philippines address closes with a direct invitation to be re-baptized at the conference, by men holding Snuffer’s restored authority, with the assurance that the old self is washed away in the water like Christ in the tomb and that the believer rises from the water as a new person. The reader who has followed Snuffer through eight years of addresses, from the wide-armed welcome of Cerritos 2017 to the closed door of the Philippines 2025, has now reached the place where the only step remaining is to accept the closed door and walk through it.

This is where the corpus has been heading all along.

VI. Pastoral Closing

To Leonard. With this essay the four-series systematic Snuffer engagement is complete. Across six engagement essays now, totaling somewhere around thirty-five thousand words, I have tried to engage Snuffer’s framework with the seriousness it deserves — to credit what is honorable in it, to name what is genuine in the pastoral substance of the men around it, to acknowledge what is true in the historical observations it makes, and at every load-bearing point to ask whether the framework’s foundation can hold the weight it is being asked to bear. My honest conclusion, after sustained engagement, is that the foundation cannot hold the weight. The biblical foreclosure of the restoration claim stands. The historical case for Joseph Smith as God’s prophet is substantially weaker than the historical case for the apostolic origin of the New Testament. The doctrinal content of Mormon scripture contradicts the apostolic deposit at structural points. The post-Smith catalog of Mormon institutional failure is, by Christ’s own promise in Matthew 16:18, evidence against the framework rather than for it. The arc of progressive narrowing across the Addresses to All Christians — from front porch to closed door — is an arc that the apostolic-Christian gospel does not require.

The position I stated in the Christian Restoration series essay and the Christian Restoration Continues series essay stands. Your baptism does not need to be redone. The framework around your baptism is, I believe, mistaken. The faith inside the framework is not. The Christ in whose name you sought baptism is the Christ Peter confessed at Caesarea Philippi, and your faith in Him places you on the foundation Christ Himself laid. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his (Romans 8:9) — and the converse: if you have the Spirit of Christ, you are His, regardless of which administrant held the bowl when the water touched your head. The 2025 Philippines address says you need to be re-baptized. The apostolic deposit says you do not. I follow the apostolic deposit on this question.

What I want most for you, as we close this engagement, is that the friendship and the fellowship survive the disagreement. We can disagree about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, the 2017 Boise covenant, and the men at bornofwater.org. We cannot disagree about the Christ we both confess, because that Christ is one. The unity that matters is the unity Paul speaks of in Ephesians 4: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. That unity is real between you and me, however firmly I hold to my position about the framework you are inside.

To anyone reading this who is being drawn toward bornofwater.org. The arc of the corpus you have been reading is not what the front porch suggests. The front porch is genuine; the closed door is also genuine; and the closed door is where the front porch has been leading. By the time you are invited to be re-baptized into Snuffer’s restored authority, you will be told that every other baptism you may have received is invalid, that the historic Christian creeds your faith was formed in are an abomination, that the doctrine of the Trinity that has confessed Christ as God for two thousand years is a stumbling block, and that you are no more Christian than those who crucified the Lord if you decline to receive the Book of Mormon as the interpretive key to all scripture.

You do not need to walk through that closed door. The Christ you are seeking is the Christ Peter confessed, the Christ the apostles preached, the Christ the historic creeds confess. He has been here all along. He has not been hiding behind a closed door waiting for you to be re-baptized into a 2017 Boise covenant. He has been offering Himself freely to every honest seeker since Pentecost, and He is offering Himself to you now, on the same terms He has always offered Himself: faith, repentance, baptism into His name in any of countless faithful Christian congregations that confess Him truly. The historic Christian church is your home if you want it to be. You do not need to be told that everything you have been is an abomination before you can come.

To the fellowship. With the licensing infrastructure now in place (commit 64fe027) and the four-series Snuffer engagement complete, the corpus has reached a meaningful inflection point. We have, between the April 25 Mormonism essay, the phenomenology-of-the-Cross standalone, the April 19 fellowship-meeting analysis, the three-conversations-at-one-table essay, the Snuffer-evaluation essay, the Restoration-That-Was-Not-Needed essay, the Upon-This-Rock standalone, and the four series-engagement essays of April 28, a substantial Christian-engagement-with-Mormonism corpus that did not exist a week ago. The doctrinal positions are settled. The pastoral posture toward Leonard is consistent. The biblical foundations are clearly named. The arc of the work is now visible.

What remains is the harder work — the work that goes beyond writing essays — of continuing to walk in the same room with Leonard, of holding the friendship through the disagreement, of trusting the Spirit to do the work that argument alone cannot do, and of staying open to the possibility that we may have been wrong about something and that further conversation may yet teach us more than further essays will. The systematic engagement is complete. The friendship is not. The friendship continues.

Thomas

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11

“There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” — Ephesians 4:4–6

“I beseech you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” — Jude 3

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

280428 Denver Snuffer – Series 3/4 – Restoration Continued

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Theology That Begins After the Step Not Taken

A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Christian Restoration Continues (Series 3/4 lectures 1-7)

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer, Christian Restoration Continues lecture series (Parts 1-7), available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html#restoration-continues. The series is the third of four corpus-defining lecture series posted at learnofchrist.org. Where the Reformation series traced the historical setup, and the Christian Restoration series named Joseph Smith and concluded with the altar call at bornofwater.org, Christian Restoration Continues elaborates the doctrinal and historical-theological framework of Snuffer’s own movement: the 1832 condemnation, the 1841 rejection, the three eschatological tasks left undone, and the 2017 Boise covenant as the resumption point.

Context: This is the fifth Snuffer engagement in the corpus and the third in the systematic four-series treatment. The companion essays so far are: Culture by Precept and Practice (April 26), Testimony of Jesus and the Restoration Claim (April 27), Upon This Rock (April 28), Reformation Series (April 28), and Christian Restoration Series (April 28). The April 28 essay engaging the Christian Restoration series ended with a direct address to Leonard about his baptism and a counter-invitation to anyone reading toward bornofwater.org. The present essay shifts the engagement again: from analyzing Snuffer’s evangelistic appeal, to engaging the doctrinal framework his own movement now offers.

To the Fellowship —

Where the previous two Snuffer series I engaged today — Reformation and Christian Restoration — were largely historical in character (Reformation history; Joseph Smith and the Mormon-Campbellite intersection), this third series is largely doctrinal. The seven parts elaborate the theology of Snuffer’s specific movement: how the early Mormons came under divine condemnation in 1832, how they were formally rejected in 1841 for failing to build the Nauvoo temple, how three great eschatological tasks remain undone, how the 2017 Boise covenant resumed the restoration, what scriptures the movement has now produced, what gathering work it is undertaking among Jewish and Native American remnants, and what the coming Zion will look like in a single-generation eschatological fulfillment.

The character of the engagement has to shift accordingly. The Reformation series engagement asked is the historical narrative accurate, and how is it being framed? The Christian Restoration series engagement asked do the prophetic claims about Joseph Smith hold up under examination, and what is the appropriate response to the altar call? The Christian Restoration Continues series asks something different. This series presupposes the answers to those previous questions and proceeds to elaborate the resulting theology. The Christian engagement must therefore name the structural feature that defines the entire series: every doctrinal claim in these seven parts presupposes a step that the prior series did not justify and that historic Christianity has not taken — the acceptance of Joseph Smith’s revelations as scripture authoritative for Christian doctrine.

This is the analytical key. Christian Restoration Continues is a theology that begins after the step not taken. To engage it on its own terms would require a Christian to accept, before the engagement begins, the very prior that the previous Snuffer essays have shown to be unjustified. To engage it from outside that prior is to find that almost every doctrinal claim in the series rests on Mormon scripture cited as authoritative — D&C 84, D&C 124, the Joseph Smith Translation of Genesis, the King Follett discourse — that the apostolic deposit gives no grounds for accepting.

I will engage the series in five movements. First, what is theologically and pastorally honorable in Snuffer’s account. Second, the structural feature I just named — that the entire series is built on a prior the previous engagement has not granted, and the implications of that. Third, three specific doctrinal claims that deserve direct examination on their own terms, even within the constraints of that structural problem: the condemnation-rejection framework in Parts 1-2, the three things left undone in Part 3, and the Zion without hierarchy claim in Part 7. Fourth, the eschatological dating problem in Part 7’s appeal to Matthew 24:34. Fifth, what this all means pastorally — for Leonard, and for any reader who has reached this point in the corpus and is being invited to take Snuffer’s framework as the final word on Christian theology.

I. What Is Honorable in the Account

Before any structural critique, let me name what is honorable in this series. There are at least four things.

1. Snuffer’s diagnosis of LDS institutional self-deception is unsparing and substantively right. Part 4 traces the historical record of Brigham Young, John Taylor, and the LDS Church’s own admissions that the temple ordinances Joseph Smith left behind were unfinished, that Brigham Young himself acknowledged much of the temple work would have to wait until a resurrected Joseph Smith could more fully instruct him on the relevant ordinances, and that John Taylor (Young’s successor) similarly admitted that things were in their unfinished shape because Joseph had felt rushed by a premonition of his impending death. These are statements from Mormon prophets themselves admitting incompleteness. Snuffer correctly observes that the LDS Church eventually abandoned any idea of finishing the temple rites and began claiming that the unfinished version was itself the fullness. This is internal Mormon evidence that the institutional inheritance is not what it claims to be — and Snuffer uses it honestly.

2. The hierarchy critique in Part 7 is theologically substantive. Snuffer’s claim that hierarchy makes Zion impossible — that persuasion, meekness, unfeigned love, and pure knowledge are the only tools that can produce Zion — is, in its theological substance, a faithful echo of New Testament teaching about the Christian community. “But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25-26). Snuffer is reading something genuine in this. The structural pathology of religious hierarchy — the displacement of the Spirit’s voice by titles, offices, governing prerogatives — is a real pathology, and the New Testament warns about it directly.

3. The claim that Zion will be a community of one heart, one mind, with no poor among them, refusing to take up arms against the neighbor, is genuine Christian eschatology in substance. When Snuffer describes Zion in Part 7, he is describing — even if from within his own framework — the same eschatological community the Bible describes: a people of one heart and mind (Acts 4:32), with no poor among them (Acts 4:34), characterized by peace rather than violence (Isaiah 2:4 / Micah 4:3, the swords-into-plowshares vision). The substance of the description is sound. The question is whether the means by which Snuffer believes that community is being assembled — through his own movement’s covenantal renewal, scriptural production, and prophetic continuation — is the means God is actually using.

4. The 2017 Jerusalem-as-capital observation is historically real and theologically suggestive. Part 6 notes the chronology: Israel founded 1948; East Jerusalem captured in 1967; United States recognition of Jerusalem as capital in December 2017. These are real events with real prophetic-eschatological resonance for Christians and Mormons alike. Christians who care about biblical eschatology — particularly those reading the Romans 11 promise that “all Israel shall be saved” — have been watching the same chronology with their own questions about prophetic timing. Snuffer’s noting of this chronology is a point on which Christians and Mormon-tradition readers can agree something is happening, even if we disagree about what it means.

These four things deserve to be acknowledged. Snuffer is not making everything up. He is reading real patterns, identifying real institutional failures, articulating real theological substance. The structural disagreement is about the framework he uses to organize these observations and the prior commitments he asks the reader to accept.

II. The Theology That Begins After the Step Not Taken

Now to the structural feature that defines the entire series.

Read these seven parts carefully and notice what kinds of claims do the load-bearing work. Part 1’s central claim is that the early Mormons came under divine condemnation in 1832 — and the proof Snuffer offers is a quotation from D&C 84:54-58. Part 2’s central claim is that the Mormons were formally rejected in 1841 for failing to build the Nauvoo temple — and the proof Snuffer offers is a quotation from D&C 124. Part 3’s three eschatological tasks are sourced from Mormon scripture; the fullness of the priesthood concept is from D&C 124; the New Jerusalem claim is from Mormon scriptural sources. Part 4 cites Brigham Young and John Taylor as authoritative voices on the unfinished restoration. Part 5 grounds the case for the Snuffer Restoration Edition in the 1832 condemnation passage and in Joseph Smith’s claimed warnings about the fullness of the scriptures. Part 6’s restoration-of-the-remnants doctrine is built from the Book of Mormon’s account of Christ visiting the Americas (which is not in the New Testament). Part 7’s eschatological vision is constructed primarily from the Joseph Smith Translation of Genesis (the Moses-Enoch material, which is not in the Hebrew Bible).

In every one of these load-bearing moves, the authoritative source is Mormon scripture — not the apostolic deposit. The passages from Matthew, Jude, and Isaiah that appear in Part 7 function as supporting material around a structure whose load-bearing components are Joseph Smith’s revelations.

This is the structural feature. The theology of the Christian Restoration Continues series is constructed on a foundation that historic Christianity has not accepted as foundational. And this is not a minor adjustment to historic Christian theology. It is a wholesale relocation of the theological foundation from the New Testament canon to the Mormon canon. The New Testament passages used in support of the framework (Matthew 24:34 in Part 7, Jude 14 on Enoch in Part 7, John 10:16 on the other sheep in Part 6) are read through the Mormon canon’s interpretive lens, with the meaning each passage takes within the Mormon framework substantially different from the meaning it takes within the historic Christian framework.

The April 27 essay (The Restoration That Was Not Needed) and the April 28 essay (Snuffer Christian Restoration Series) have already engaged the prior question. The Mormon canon is not authoritative scripture for Christian doctrine, because:

1. The biblical foreclosure of new revelation outside the apostolic deposit (Galatians 1:8, Jude 3, 2 Timothy 3:16-17 making the apostolic deposit thoroughly furnishing the man of God to every good work)
2. The historical record of Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims, which on serious examination are substantially weaker than the historical credentials of the New Testament documents
3. The doctrinal content of Mormon scripture, which — at multiple structural points — contradicts the apostolic deposit (Christology, theology proper, anthropology, soteriology)
4. The post-Smith catalog of Mormon institutional failure documented honestly by Snuffer himself, which by Christ’s own promise in Matthew 16:18 should not have happened to a movement Christ Himself had founded

If those four arguments hold — and I believe they do — then Christian Restoration Continues is offering a doctrinal framework constructed on a foundation that has not been justified and that, on serious examination, cannot be justified. The seven parts are internally coherent only within a framework that the prior question has shown to be unjustified.

This is what I mean by the theology that begins after the step not taken. The previous Snuffer series invited the reader to take a step — to accept Joseph Smith as God’s prophet and his revelations as authoritative scripture. The reader who accepts that step encounters Christian Restoration Continues as a coherent and serious theological elaboration. The reader who has not accepted that step encounters the same series as a sequence of claims whose authoritative sources are ones the reader does not recognize as authoritative.

This is the structural problem. Almost everything that follows is downstream of it.

III. Three Doctrinal Claims Worth Examining Directly

Even granting the structural problem, three specific claims in this series deserve examination on their own terms — partly because they are doctrinally interesting in themselves, partly because each of them, when examined carefully, illuminates something further about the framework’s reliability.

1. The condemnation-rejection framework (Parts 1-2)

Snuffer’s framework holds that the early Mormon church came under divine condemnation in 1832, was given a final chance to repent in 1841 with the temple-building commandment, failed to meet that standard, and was therefore rejected as a church. This rejection then carried forward through 185 years of Mormon factional history until the 2017 Boise covenant lifted it.

Two observations.

First, this framework is internally consistent within Mormon theology and explains a great deal that needs explaining about post-Smith Mormonism. If the early Mormons really were under divine condemnation in 1832, and really were rejected in 1841, then the entire institutional history that follows — Brigham Young, polygamy, Mountain Meadows, the splinter sects, the institutional drift of the LDS Church — is the natural consequence of operating without divine sanction. The framework provides a way to take Joseph Smith seriously as a prophet while acknowledging the catastrophic failure of post-Smith Mormonism. It is a coherent move within the framework.

Second, the framework is not internally consistent with itself when examined carefully. If the priesthood authority Joseph received was given on the condition that it shall never be taken again from the earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness (an unfulfilled condition still pending), then the priesthood authority continued through the rejection. But if the church itself was rejected in 1841 — formally, by God, as Snuffer reads D&C 124 — then in what sense was the priesthood authority operative during the 185 years between 1841 and 2017? Brigham Young, by Snuffer’s own account, was a self-described “Yankee Guesser” and a secret adulterer. The men he ordained, who ordained their successors, who eventually claimed to ordain Snuffer’s lineage, were operating during the rejection period. Snuffer’s framework requires the priesthood authority to remain valid through this period (to ground his own movement’s authority claims today) while the church through which it was transmitted was simultaneously rejected. This is not impossible to reconcile within Mormon theology, but it requires careful work that the series does not do.

The deeper Christian observation is this: the entire condemnation-rejection-renewal pattern presupposes a covenantal-conditional framework that maps Mosaic-covenant logic (where Israel’s covenantal standing depended on obedience to specific commandments and could be broken by disobedience) onto Christian community. But the New Testament’s covenantal framework is different. The new covenant in Christ’s blood is unconditionally given on the believer’s faith side — “He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). The believer is not under threat of corporate rejection if a community fails to build a building. The believer’s standing rests on Christ’s finished work, not on the community’s ongoing performance. Snuffer’s framework reads Christian community through a Mosaic-covenant lens that the apostolic deposit explicitly moves beyond. “Ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest… But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God” (Hebrews 12:18, 22). The church Christ built is not a renewed Sinai community under conditional covenant. It is a Pentecost community under the unconditional covenant of Christ’s blood.

2. The three things left undone (Part 3)

Snuffer identifies three eschatological tasks remaining: building a temple for the Lord to return to, conferring the fullness of the priesthood, and establishing a New Jerusalem on the American continent.

The Christian observation here is that none of these three things is in the New Testament.

The New Testament does not require the building of a physical temple before Christ’s return. On the contrary, the New Testament explicitly teaches that the Christian believer’s body is the temple (1 Corinthians 6:19), that the church corporately is the temple (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, Ephesians 2:21-22), and that the heavenly city has no temple at all because “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it” (Revelation 21:22). The expectation of a physical temple as a precondition for Christ’s return is a feature of Mormon theology, not New Testament theology.

The New Testament does not refer to a fullness of the priesthood in the sense Mormon theology means it. The priesthood in the New Testament is the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9, “ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood”) — every believer, by virtue of union with Christ the High Priest. There is no separate fullness to be conferred upon some believers and not others, no graded structure of priestly authority, no temple ordinances through which the fullness is administered. The Mormon concept of fullness of the priesthood is constructed entirely from the Joseph Smith canon and has no precedent in the apostolic deposit.

The New Testament does not promise a New Jerusalem on the American continent. The New Jerusalem of Revelation 21 descends out of heaven to the renewed earth at Christ’s return — it is not built by human hands in any geographic location, American or otherwise. The American-continent location is a feature of Mormon theology built on Mormon scripture (specifically Ether 13 in the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s revelations identifying Independence, Missouri as the future Zion location). It is not in the New Testament.

Each of these three tasks, then, is a task assigned by the Mormon framework rather than by the apostolic deposit. The Christian who reads the New Testament as the authoritative deposit for Christian doctrine has no reason to expect any of these three things to occur as preconditions for Christ’s return. The reader who is being told that these three things are essential and that Snuffer’s movement is laboring to accomplish them is being recruited into a project that has no authorization in the apostolic deposit.

3. The “Zion without hierarchy” claim (Part 7)

Snuffer’s claim in Part 7 is theologically interesting, partly because it is in some tension with his own movement’s actual practice. He writes that Zion will be produced by a journey begun in equality, pursued by equals, with no man demanding submission and that hierarchy makes Zion impossible. Persuasion, meekness, unfeigned love, and pure knowledge are the only legitimate tools.

The substance of this claim is theologically defensible. The New Testament teaching about the Christian community emphasizes mutual love (John 13:34-35), the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:9), the Spirit’s distribution of gifts severally as He wills (1 Corinthians 12:11), and Christ’s explicit warning against the hierarchy patterns of the world’s rulers (Matthew 20:25-28). A Christian community organized by mutual love, mutual submission, and the distributed leading of the Spirit, rather than by titles and offices and prerogatives, is closer to the apostolic vision than the institutional structures most large Christian bodies have developed. Snuffer is reading something real in the New Testament here.

But the substance sits in apparent tension with what Snuffer’s movement actually does in practice. The companion lecture Culture by Precept and Practice (engaged in the April 26 essay) describes a procedure in which Snuffer himself receives prophetic identification of who should be set apart for which office, conducts a ratification vote, and announces that the Lord required mutual unanimous agreement. This is, structurally, a hierarchy in which Snuffer functions as the apex prophetic voice through whom God identifies offices and personnel, even if no formal title of “prophet” or “president” is used. The disclaimer that hierarchy makes Zion impossible is, in practice, undercut by the way the movement operates.

The Christian observation is this: real Zion, as the New Testament describes it, is a community in which Christ Himself is the head — the only mediator (1 Timothy 2:5), the one who indwells every member by His Spirit, the one whose direct relationship with each believer needs no earthly intermediary. Hierarchy is impossible not because no man may demand submission, but because Christ has already taken the headship, and any human claimant — however meek, however persuasive, however unfeignedly loving — would be displacing the One whose place it is. The Christos Civitas vision developed in the Upon This Rock essay is precisely this: conscious participation in the church Christ has been building since Pentecost, with Christ as the only head, every believer indwelt by the Spirit, no human prophet required because the apostolic deposit is sufficient and the Spirit who indwells the believer makes every Christian a participant in the same priesthood Peter described.

Snuffer is reading the right scripture and reaching the right conclusion partway. He stops one step short — at no man demanding submission — without taking the further step to because Christ has already taken the only headship that the church requires.

IV. The Single-Generation Eschatology

Part 7 closes with an explicit application of Matthew 24:34 to Snuffer’s contemporary movement. Snuffer cites Christ’s words: “this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” — and reads this as a prophecy that a single generation, presumably the one within which Snuffer’s movement is now operating, will see all the eschatological events fulfilled, including the building of the temple, the conferring of the fullness of the priesthood, the establishing of the New Jerusalem, and Christ’s return in glory.

This application of Matthew 24:34 deserves careful treatment, because the verse has been one of the most contested in Christian eschatology, and the pattern of applying it to one’s own contemporary moment is a recurring feature of restorationist movements throughout history.

The historic Christian readings of Matthew 24:34 fall into roughly three families. First, the preterist reading: Christ was speaking of the generation alive at His prediction, and the events He described — particularly the destruction of the temple in AD 70 — did indeed occur within that generation, with the broader eschatological language being typological language for that historical event. Second, the futurist reading: Christ was speaking of a generation alive at the end of the age, who would see all the events described unfold within their lifetime. Third, the generic reading: the Greek genea can mean “race” or “kind” rather than “generation,” and the passage is a promise that the human race or the Jewish people would not pass away before all things were fulfilled.

Each of these readings has serious defenders and serious problems. What none of them supports is the move Snuffer makes — applying the prophecy to one’s own present-day moment as the generation in question. The futurist reading would say that the generation alive at the time of fulfillment would see all things fulfilled, but the futurist reading does not give a way to identify which generation that is in advance. To say that Snuffer’s contemporary movement is the generation in question is to make a prophetic claim that goes beyond what the verse, on any of its serious readings, will support.

This pattern — the application of prophetic timing texts to one’s own movement and one’s own moment — has a long and unhappy history in restorationist Christianity. The Millerites (William Miller’s movement) calculated Christ’s return for 1843, then 1844 (the Great Disappointment). Charles Taze Russell’s movement (which became the Jehovah’s Witnesses) predicted 1914, then 1925, then 1975. Harold Camping predicted 2011. In every case, the pattern was the same: a sincere movement, real spiritual seriousness, careful proof-texting from prophetic passages, and a confident identification of the present moment as the moment of fulfillment. In every case, the prediction failed.

The Christian observation is not that Snuffer is necessarily wrong about the timing — Christ may indeed return within the generation now living, and no one is in a position to say otherwise. The observation is that the pattern of reading Matthew 24:34 as authorizing one’s own contemporary movement to be the generation of fulfillment is an unreliable pattern. It has been wrong before. It is likely to be wrong again. The more sober Christian posture is the Lord may return today; He may return in a thousand years; either way, the believer’s task is to be found faithful, in the apostolic deposit, indwelt by the Spirit, doing the work the Master has given to do.

“Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” — Matthew 24:42

“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” — Matthew 24:36

The same Matthew 24 that contains this generation shall not pass also contains these statements. No man knows the day or the hour — including Denver Snuffer, including any Christian eschatologist, including any movement claiming to have decoded the prophetic timing. The faithful posture toward the timing of Christ’s return is sober watchfulness, not confident assignment of the prophecy to one’s own present moment.

V. What This Means for Leonard, and What This Means for the Fellowship

Let me close pastorally.

To Leonard. The seven parts of this series elaborate the theological framework you have entered. The framework is internally coherent. It explains a great deal about post-Smith Mormonism that needed explaining. It offers a coherent eschatological vision and a serious moral seriousness about the believer’s responsibility to live up to God’s standards. The men around Snuffer are, by all evidence, sincere. The community is, by all evidence, doing real spiritual work.

I am not able to follow you into it. Not because the people are insincere or the community lacks real virtues, but because the entire framework is built on a step that the apostolic deposit does not authorize me to take. Joseph Smith’s revelations are not, to my reading of the apostolic deposit, scripture authoritative for Christian doctrine. The condemnation-rejection-renewal pattern Snuffer reads in D&C 84 and 124 is read into a covenantal framework the New Testament has moved beyond. The three eschatological tasks of Part 3 are not in the New Testament. The single-generation reading of Matthew 24:34 applied to Snuffer’s own present moment is the kind of prophetic reading that has been wrong before.

I want you to know, again — as I said at the close of the previous essay — that I do not believe your baptism was invalid in any sense that requires re-baptism. The faith you brought to the water was directed toward the Christ Peter confessed, and that faith places you on the foundation that is Christ. The framework around your baptism is, I believe, mistaken. The faith inside the framework is not. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his (Romans 8:9) — and the converse: if you have the Spirit of Christ, regardless of which framework you were in when you received Him, you are His.

But I would ask you to read this series of five essays — the April 27, the three of April 28, and this one — with the seriousness their cumulative argument deserves. If the foundation Snuffer’s framework rests on cannot be justified, then the elaborate doctrinal structure built on it cannot be justified either. The honorable and sincere people in the movement do not change that fact. The genuine spiritual fruit they are producing in their lives does not change that fact (the Spirit blows where He wills, and works in many traditions whose frameworks are imperfect, including yours, including mine). What the framework needs is justification at the foundation, and I have not found that justification anywhere in five extensive Snuffer engagements.

To the fellowship. The five-essay corpus on Mormonism and Snuffer is now substantially complete in its initial pass. There is one more series Thomas has indicated will be transmitted (Snuffer’s ongoing public ministry through the present), and the engagement with that series will be the natural conclusion of the systematic treatment. But the structural arguments are now established: the biblical foreclosure of new revelation outside the apostolic deposit, the historical weakness of Joseph Smith’s prophetic claims, the doctrinal incompatibility of Mormon theology with the apostolic deposit, the post-Smith Mormon catalog as evidence by Christ’s own standard against the restoration claim, and the structural problem of Christian Restoration Continues as a theology that begins after a step not justified.

What we owe Leonard, and what we owe every reader of these essays who is in the same position, is honest engagement and an open invitation back to the historic apostolic Christ. We do not need to win an argument. We need to keep the door open, keep the friendship intact, keep the witness clear, and trust the Holy Spirit to do the work that argument alone cannot do — the work of bringing every honest seeker home to the Christ they are seeking, whatever path they took to get there.

Thomas

“Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; In whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.” — Ephesians 2:19-22

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” — Matthew 24:35-36

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

260428 Denver Snuffer – Series 2/4 – The Restoration

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

The Altar Call at bornofwater.org

A Christian Engagement with Denver Snuffer’s Christian Restoration Series (Series 2/4, Lectures 1-7)

Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 28, 2026

Source: Denver Snuffer, Christian Restoration lecture series (Parts 1-7), available as transcripts at learnofchrist.org/videos.html#restoration. The series is the second of four corpus-defining lecture series posted at learnofchrist.org. Where the Protestant Reformation series traced the Reformation history without yet naming the restorer, the Christian Restoration series names Joseph Smith, narrates the Mormon-Campbellite collision, catalogs the post-Smith fragmentation, and concludes with an explicit baptismal invitation directing readers to bornofwater.org to be baptized by men who claim authority from Jesus Christ to administer the ordinance.

Context: This is the fourth Snuffer engagement in the corpus and the second in the systematic four-series treatment. The companion essays so far are: Culture by Precept and Practice (April 26), Testimony of Jesus and the Restoration Claim (April 27), Upon This Rock (April 28), and the Protestant Reformation Series (April 28). The April 27 essay engaged Snuffer’s restoration thesis; the present essay engages Snuffer’s restoration narrative — the seven-part account of how he believes the restoration unfolded from Roger Williams to the Campbells to Joseph Smith to the 2017 Boise covenant — and the altar call with which the series concludes.

To the Fellowship —

The seven-part Christian Restoration series is the central evangelistic document of Denver Snuffer’s public ministry. Where the Reformation series I engaged earlier today positions Protestantism as a preparatory movement, this series names what was being prepared: Joseph Smith’s restoration in 1820, its tragic unraveling after his death in 1844, and Snuffer’s own claim that the restoration was resumed in September 2017 by a body of believers in Boise, Idaho who became the first since Joseph Smith’s day to accept the Book of Mormon as a covenant. The series concludes — and this is the analytical key to the whole — with a direct invitation to the reader to be baptized at bornofwater.org, where men who claim apostolic authority from Jesus Christ Himself will perform the ordinance.

This is not a lecture series about history. This is an altar call. The historical material in Parts 1-6 is doing the work of preparing the reader for the decision Part 7 invites them to make. Leonard has made that decision. The essay I am writing now is, in significant part, written to him — to lay alongside his decision the careful examination that any decision of that magnitude deserves.

I will engage the series in five movements. First, what is honorable in Snuffer’s narrative arc. Second, the Reformation-was-insufficient argument as it appears here (Parts 1-3), and where it both repeats and goes beyond what the April 27 essay already addressed. Third, the Joseph Smith account in Part 4 and what Snuffer chooses to defend versus what he chooses to assert without defense. Fourth, the catalog of post-Smith Mormon failure in Parts 5-6, which I want to name as a remarkable gift to the Christian case rather than damage to it. Fifth, the altar call in Part 7, which is where the essay must, in the end, speak directly to Leonard and to anyone reading over his shoulder who is being invited to take the same step.

I. What Is Honorable in the Narrative Arc

Snuffer is doing serious historical work, and the series deserves credit for its substantive accuracy on several fronts.

1. The Roger Williams treatment in Part 2 is genuinely careful. Roger Williams (1603-1683) was a remarkable figure — Baptist founder, abolitionist, advocate for indigenous peoples, a man whose conscience drove him out of Massachusetts and into the founding of Rhode Island. Snuffer correctly highlights the wall-of-separation language Williams used (which Jefferson later borrowed for the First Amendment), correctly notes Williams’s conviction that no recovery of original Christianity was possible without God’s direct involvement, and correctly quotes Williams’s striking declaration that he was waiting for new apostles to be sent by the Great Head of the Church. This is honest history. Williams really did say what Snuffer says he said, and the citation is accurate.

2. The Campbell treatment in Part 3 is similarly careful. Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington (1809), Alexander Campbell’s intellectual development, the famous motto “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent,” and the formation of what became the Disciples of Christ / Churches of Christ tradition — Snuffer presents this material accurately. The Campbells were genuine seekers, and their restorationist instinct was a serious attempt to recover apostolic simplicity by stripping away creedal accretions.

3. The Sidney Rigdon connection in Part 5 is historically real and consequential. Snuffer correctly notes that Rigdon was a prominent Campbellite preacher before joining the Mormon movement, that his conversion brought a substantial portion of the Campbellite Ohio congregations with him, that Mormon success in Ohio came at the expense of the Campbellites, and that this provoked Alexander Campbell’s blistering 1831 review of the Book of Mormon. The Mormon-Campbellite collision is one of the most consequential intersections of nineteenth-century American religion, and Snuffer handles it accurately.

4. The acknowledgment of post-Smith Mormon catastrophe in Part 6 is unsparing and accurate. Brigham Young’s institution of polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857 (in which over 120 men, women, and children of the Baker-Fancher emigrant party were murdered by Mormon militia and confederate Paiutes), the post-1860 Reorganized LDS sect’s abandonment of the Book of Mormon, the polygamist splinter groups’ systematic violation of marriage and child-protection laws — Snuffer names every one of these. The unsparing honesty about Salt Lake LDS and its successor sects is something Christian apologetics typically must establish against Mormon defenses; Snuffer establishes it for us. He has read the history, and he is willing to say what the history shows.

5. The diagnosis of authority-displacing-revelation is theologically sharp. The closing of Part 5 contains one of the most theologically substantive paragraphs in the entire series — Snuffer’s observation that Mormonism, like Roman Catholicism before it, succumbed to the central pathology of religious institutional life: the displacement of revelation and God’s voice by hierarchy, position, title, and governing prerogative. This is exactly the diagnosis a Bible-based Christian critique of both Catholicism and Mormonism would make. Snuffer makes it from the inside.

6. The post-Smith chronology in Part 6 is devastating to the very tradition Snuffer claims to defend. From Joseph and Hyrum’s murder on June 27, 1844 to Brigham Young’s elected leadership on August 8, 1844 — six weeks. Three years later, August 1847, Young became sole president. In neither year was there a voice from heaven guiding the succession. Snuffer states this plainly. For a movement whose entire structural claim depends on continuing prophetic authority, the absence of any such authority at the founding moment of post-Smith Mormonism is a fact of enormous evidential weight, and Snuffer reports it without flinching.

These six points should be acknowledged. They show that Snuffer is not engaged in cheerleading. He has read the history honestly and reports it accurately. The question is whether the conclusion he draws from the history is the one the history actually supports.

II. The Reformation-Was-Insufficient Argument, Revisited

Parts 1-3 of this series reprise material the April 27 essay already engaged. Snuffer claims that Christianity had not merely declined, it had perished between the close of the New Testament and the sixteenth century; that the Reformers could subtract corruption but could not restore what was lost; that Roger Williams correctly perceived that no true church existed and that new apostles would have to be sent before any recovery could occur; and that Thomas Campbell’s effort to recover the original by subtraction alone could not work because adding could only come from God.

I have already engaged this argument at length in The Restoration That Was Not Needed (April 27). The biblical foreclosure stands: Christ promised in Matthew 16:18 that the gates of hell would not prevail against His church, and in Matthew 28:20 that He would be with His people alway, even unto the end of the world. If Christianity perished, Christ broke His promise. The Wesley citation Snuffer uses is, on careful reading, about the decline of charismatic gifts in the post-Constantinian church rather than about the perishing of true faith; Wesley himself died a Trinitarian Anglican who would have been horrified to be conscripted for the Joseph Smith project. The Roger Williams citation is similar: Williams remained a Christian within a tradition he believed to be substantially valid, awaiting eschatological renewal rather than a 19th-century New York prophet.

Two observations specific to Parts 1-3 deserve to be added to what I said before.

1. Part 1’s catalog of Reformer moral failures is being deployed asymmetrically. Snuffer names Luther’s Peasants’ War rhetoric (the famous letter calling for the slaying of obstinate peasants), Calvin’s role in the execution of Michael Servetus, and Knox’s involvement in the murder of Cardinal Beaton. He uses these failures to support the conclusion that Reform was unable to escape the low and un-Christian condition the Reformers inherited from their Catholic predecessor. But the same standard, applied to the Mormon tradition Snuffer himself defends, would demand that we conclude Restoration was unable to escape the low and un-Christian condition of its own founder and immediate successors — Joseph Smith’s documented marriages to women already married to other living men, Brigham Young’s institution of polygamy and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the polygamist splinter groups’ ongoing crimes against children. The asymmetric treatment is the framing move. Reformer moral failures are evidence that their movement was insufficient. Mormon moral failures are evidence that the followers failed the prophet, while the prophet himself remains beyond serious examination.

2. Part 3’s framing of the Campbells as preparatory is the rhetorical bridge to Joseph Smith. Snuffer presents Thomas and Alexander Campbell as restorationists who understood the right goal but lacked the necessary means — they could subtract but could not add. And adding could only come from God. This is the line that prepares the reader to receive Part 4: God did add, and the means was Joseph Smith. Notice the implicit move. The Campbells’ inability to recover lost truths by subtraction alone is taken as evidence that something needs to be added to the apostolic deposit. But the Christian position is that nothing needs to be added because nothing essential was ever lost. The Campbells failed in their goal not because they could not add, but because their goal was misconceived from the start. The apostolic deposit, faithfully read, is sufficient. Subtraction of medieval accretions is not a partial work. It is the whole work, because what is underneath the accretions is the apostolic deposit itself.

The Campbells, on this view, were partly right and partly wrong. They were right that historic Christian creedal traditions had accumulated authority beyond what scripture warranted. They were wrong to think the Bible alone, read without the historic creedal tradition’s insights into Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy, would naturally produce apostolic Christianity. The history of the Disciples of Christ tradition has, in fact, demonstrated both — they recovered congregational autonomy and biblical primacy genuinely, and they produced over time a tradition that has wrestled (with mixed results) with the Christological depth the historic creeds were articulating. The lesson is not that subtraction needed supplementing by 19th-century revelation. The lesson is that subtraction needs to be guided by the apostolic deposit’s own internal coherence, which the historic creeds at their best articulated.

III. The Joseph Smith Account in Part 4 — What Is Asserted and What Is Defended

Part 4 of the series is the load-bearing apologetic for Joseph Smith. It is here that Snuffer must persuade the reader that an actual divine restoration occurred through this man. The remarkable feature of the account is what it asserts and what it does not defend.

What is asserted: That Joseph Smith, at age fourteen, went into the woods in upstate New York to ask which church to join; that he encountered a pillar of fire and was told God had a work for him to do; that in the years following, angels appeared to him and gave him an ancient book which he translated by the gift and power of God into the Book of Mormon; that Christ Himself appeared to him on multiple occasions; that he produced more scripture than any prophet or apostle of the Bible; that he restored the authority to minister ordinances; that he prophesied events both fulfilled and yet-to-be-fulfilled.

What is not defended: The historical claims of the First Vision narrative (which exists in multiple incompatible later versions, with substantial variation in who appeared, what was said, and even whether Christ was present); the historical claims about the golden plates (no neutral witnesses, the eleven witnesses’ later religious careers and complicated testimonies, the absence of any extant material evidence); the translation method (face in a hat with a seer stone for substantial portions of the work, attested by participants like Emma Smith and David Whitmer, which raises questions about the “by the gift and power of God” claim Snuffer simply repeats); the Book of Abraham translation (where Joseph’s claimed translation of recovered Egyptian papyri can now be checked against the actual Egyptian text since the papyri were rediscovered in 1966, and the translation does not match what the text actually says); the Kinderhook plates incident (where Joseph translated a portion of fabricated metal plates as containing a record of an ancient leader); the doctrinal evolution from early Mormonism’s nearly-Trinitarian position to the Nauvoo King Follett discourse claiming the Father was once a man.

This is an apologetic strategy worth naming directly: appeal to authority by pre-supposing the authority. Joseph Smith is presented to the reader as a prophet whose claims are taken as data. The reader is invited to accept the Mormon narrative not on the strength of evidence presented but on the strength of the narrative’s own internal coherence and the moral seriousness of those who tell it. This is, of course, the same strategy any religious tradition uses for its founder — but it is worth naming because Snuffer’s broader corpus is so unsparing toward the historical record of every other religious tradition. Catholic claims he examines critically. Protestant claims he examines critically. Salt Lake LDS claims he examines critically. Joseph Smith’s foundational claims he simply asserts.

The Christian who has carefully examined the documentary record on these questions must, in honesty, name that the historical case for Joseph Smith as God’s prophet is substantially weaker than the historical case for the apostolic origin of the New Testament documents — by a wide margin. The New Testament’s historical credentials are documented in eyewitness testimony, contemporaneous letters, archaeological corroboration, and the converging consensus of secular historical scholarship that the events described did happen in roughly the form described. The Joseph Smith claims rest on the testimony of a single man, contradicted at multiple points by the documentary record, defended by a tradition that has had to revise its own historical narrative repeatedly as new documents have emerged.

I do not say this to mock Joseph Smith. I say it because Snuffer’s case requires the reader to accept Joseph Smith’s claims as comparable in evidential weight to the apostolic deposit, and they are not. Not by any honest standard of historical examination.

IV. The Catalog of Mormon Failure in Parts 5-6 — A Gift to the Christian Case

Now we come to what is, in my view, the most consequential portion of the series for the Christian engagement. Parts 5-6 are Snuffer’s catalog of post-Joseph-Smith Mormon failure, and the catalog is so honest, so unsparing, and so detailed that it constitutes — paradoxically — one of the strongest available cases for the Christian position that Joseph Smith’s revelation was not from God.

Let me lay out what Snuffer admits.

Sidney Rigdon’s reorientation of the movement. When Mormonism began, it was modeled after the Book of Mormon. Rigdon, a former Campbellite, redirected it toward recovering the New Testament Church. The movement became preoccupied with organizational structure and administrative control even during Joseph Smith’s lifetime. Joseph’s teachings and revelations became secondary and the church structure became primary. This is Snuffer’s own diagnosis. Within Joseph Smith’s lifetime, the movement he founded was already drifting from its founding revelation toward the very institutional pathology the broader Snuffer corpus is at pains to critique in Catholicism.

The 1841 temple commandment and the Mormon failure to obey. Christ commanded a temple be built; Mormons had sufficient time to build it; if they disobeyed they would be rejected. Snuffer states plainly: Mormons disobeyed. They built a Masonic Hall, brick homes, and personal property improvements instead. The temple was less than half-built when Joseph was killed three and a half years later. By Snuffer’s own framework, the Mormons were under threat of divine rejection before Joseph’s murder.

The post-1844 succession with no voice from heaven. Six weeks after Joseph and Hyrum’s murder, Brigham Young was elected by an organizational body. Three years later, he became sole president. Both in 1844 and 1847 no voice from heaven guided Mormonism as they elected replacement leaders. Snuffer says this plainly. For a tradition founded on the claim that God speaks directly to His prophets, the founding of post-Smith Mormonism was conducted by ordinary parliamentary procedure with no divine guidance. Hierarchy displaced revelation and heavenly guidance — Snuffer’s own words.

Brigham Young as the Yankee Guesser. Young himself characterized himself as a guesser rather than a prophet of Joseph Smith’s caliber. He instituted polygamy. He claimed apostates should be slain. He led the reign of terror in the Intermountain West. He bears moral responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The man who became the architect of post-Smith Mormonism was, by Snuffer’s own honest characterization, a guesser who governed by force, instituted doctrines Joseph Smith had opposed, and presided over mass murder.

The fragmentation pattern. Of the 15,000 Mormons Joseph gathered, only about half followed Young to Salt Lake. Other factions went to Wisconsin, Texas, Missouri. The RLDS sect (now Community of Christ) eventually abandoned the Book of Mormon and entertains doubts about Joseph Smith. Polygamist splinter groups have systematically violated marriage and child-protection laws to the present day. There are nearly 100 groups claiming Joseph Smith as their founder, most of which have excommunicated all the others.

The structural diagnosis. Snuffer’s most striking observation is at the end of Part 6: Mormonism fell into the central-hierarchy pathology much more quickly than Catholicism. Catholicism took three centuries from the apostolic age to the consolidation of central hierarchy. Mormonism took six weeks from Joseph Smith’s death to Brigham Young’s election by parliamentary body, and three years from Joseph Smith’s death to Young’s sole presidency. So much has been lost that it requires another restoration.

Now let us put this catalog alongside Christ’s promise in Matthew 16:18:

“Upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

If Joseph Smith’s restoration was the genuine recovery of the church Christ promised to build, then Christ’s promise should hold. The gates of hell should not have prevailed. Whatever institutional weaknesses Joseph’s followers exhibited, the church Christ promised to build cannot fail. It is the kingdom that shall never be destroyed (Daniel 2:44). It is the body Christ promised to be with alway, even unto the end of the world (Matthew 28:20).

But by Snuffer’s own honest catalog, the gates of hell did prevail against Joseph Smith’s restoration. Within Joseph’s own lifetime, the movement drifted into institutional preoccupation. Within six weeks of his death, hierarchy displaced revelation. Within three years, a self-described guesser became sole president. Within a generation, polygamy was normalized, the Mountain Meadows Massacre had occurred, and the Mormon people were under federal military occupation. Within two centuries, the movement had fragmented into approximately a hundred mutually-anathematizing factions, the largest of which has now revised its temple ceremonies repeatedly, abandoned its public association with the Book of Mormon, and faces growing internal questioning of its founder.

This is not a record consistent with the gates of hell shall not prevail. This is a record consistent with the gates of hell did prevail, repeatedly, comprehensively, and quickly. By the standard Christ Himself promised, Joseph Smith’s restoration was not the church Christ was building, because the church Christ was building cannot be defeated, and Joseph Smith’s restoration was defeated.

Snuffer’s response is to assert that the failure was the followers’ fault, not the prophet’s, and that the failure simply demonstrates the need for another restoration — his own, the 2017 Boise covenant. But this response is structurally non-falsifiable. Any failure of any restoration becomes, on this view, an opportunity for the next restoration. The pattern can repeat indefinitely without ever providing evidence against the framework. This is the structural problem: a theological system whose failures can never count against it is not a falsifiable system, and what is not falsifiable cannot be confirmed either.

Christ’s promise, by contrast, is falsifiable. If Christ’s church had been demonstrably defeated by the gates of hell — if the apostolic gospel had truly perished, if no faithful witness existed in any generation, if the eternal Word had no bride preserved on earth — then Christianity would be falsified. But it has not been falsified. The faithful witness has persisted in every generation, in every nation, regardless of which institutions were faithful and which were corrupt, because the foundation is Christ Himself and Christ Himself cannot be moved.

Snuffer’s catalog of Mormon failure does not strengthen the case for restoration. It strengthens the case against it. By his own honest reporting of what happened, Joseph Smith’s movement failed by the standard the church Christ promised must meet. The failure is not partial. It is comprehensive. And it is exactly what we would expect to see if the original revelation was not what Joseph Smith claimed it was.

V. The Altar Call — Part 7 and bornofwater.org

Part 7 is where the analytical engagement must stop and the pastoral engagement must begin, because Part 7 is not a lecture. It is an invitation.

The structure of Part 7 is a sustained doctrinal frame followed by a specific call to action. The doctrinal frame: restoration and apostasy are constants, never stasis; apostasy subtracts truth and silences God’s voice; restoration adds, recovers, returns connection to heaven; the 2017 Boise covenant began the resumption of Joseph Smith’s interrupted work; faithful followers are now publishing new scripture, accepting more of Christ’s gospel, expecting greater understanding; the movement is non-institutional, has no paid ministers, and offers baptism freely to all.

Then the call to action: if you believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who taught truth and died to save mankind from sin and death, you should act on that by being baptized in His name. Go to bornofwater.org to request baptism. Someone will come to you who has authority from Jesus Christ to administer the ordinance.

This is the moment the entire seven-part series has been building toward. The reader is being asked to take an action — to request baptism by men claiming apostolic authority outside any historic Christian tradition — and to trust that the men who arrive have the authority they claim.

I want to address this directly and seriously.

To Leonard, who has already responded. The decision you have made deserves to be honored as a sincere act of conscience. You went seeking God’s voice and you believed you found it. That seeking is the right impulse, and the fact that I do not believe you found what you sought does not diminish the seriousness of the search. I want you to know that.

But I also want to say plainly what I believe: that the men who baptized you, however sincere, do not have the apostolic authority they claim. No man does, in the sense Snuffer’s tradition means it, because that authority was never lost in the first place — there has been an unbroken witness to apostolic Christianity through every generation since Pentecost — and so the entire framework of needing to receive ordinances from authorized restored ministers rests on the prior claim that the church was lost, which Christ promised it would not be. The men at bornofwater.org are offering you an authority they do not possess, not because they are dishonest, but because the authority they claim does not exist apart from the apostolic succession that has continued, in the faithful witness of every generation of Christians, without interruption.

What does this mean for your baptism? It does not mean you are unsaved. The thief on the cross was saved without being baptized at all. The Roman centurion Cornelius was filled with the Spirit before Peter even finished his sermon and called for water. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ, not by the precision of the baptismal lineage. If you have made Peter’s confession in truth — “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” — and have trusted in the Christ that confession identifies, you stand on the foundation that Christ Himself laid, regardless of who held the bowl when the water touched your head. The foundation is Christ. The means of access to the foundation is faith. The mark of entrance to the visible church is baptism, but baptism’s validity is not principally a function of the administrant’s credentials. It is a function of the Christ in whose name it is performed, and the faith of the one being baptized.

So I do not say to you, “your baptism was invalid; you must be baptized again by a different lineage.” I say to you, “the authority claim under which you were baptized is not what its administrants believe it is, but the Christ in whose name you sought baptism is exactly who you sought, and your faith in Him is the substance of your standing.” The framework around your baptism is, I believe, mistaken. The faith inside the framework is not.

To anyone reading this who is being invited toward bornofwater.org. The invitation deserves a careful response. You do not need new apostles to be sent. You do not need a 2017 Boise covenant. You do not need to wait for the next restoration. The apostles have already been sent — by the eternal Christ, two thousand years ago — and what they delivered is in your hands when you open the New Testament. The Spirit Christ promised has been indwelling believers in every generation since Pentecost, and He indwells you the moment you trust in Christ. The church Christ promised to build has been building for two millennia, and you are invited to join it not by being baptized into a 2017 covenant in upstate Idaho but by confessing the same Christ Peter confessed, repenting of your sins, trusting in His finished work on the Cross, and being baptized into the historic body of believers in any of countless faithful congregations that confess the apostolic gospel today.

You do not need a restoration. The original is still here. The gates of hell did not prevail. Christ kept His promise. That is the gospel — not that the church was lost and is being recovered, but that the church was promised to endure and has endured.

VI. What This Series Adds to the Engagement

Stepping back, the Christian Restoration series adds three things to the larger Snuffer engagement that the previous essays did not address as directly.

First, it makes the altar call explicit. Where the Reformation series and Testimony of Jesus and Culture by Precept and Practice operated as historical-theological lectures, this series has an evangelistic endpoint at bornofwater.org. The Christian engagement therefore must include not only argument about the framework but counter-invitation to the actual Christ. I have tried to provide both.

Second, it shows what Snuffer is willing to defend and what he simply asserts. The catalog of post-Smith Mormon failure is unsparing. The defense of Joseph Smith’s prophetic authenticity is essentially absent — the claims are stated but not argued. This asymmetry is itself an argument. A thinker who critically examines every other tradition but exempts one tradition’s founder from the same critical examination is not, however learned, doing balanced work. He is doing apologetics. That is a legitimate genre, but it should be named as what it is.

Third, it confirms the structural non-falsifiability of the restoration framework. Snuffer’s response to the catalog of Mormon failure is another restoration is needed. The same response will, presumably, apply when his own 2017 movement eventually fragments or fails — yet another restoration will be needed. The framework cannot be tested against any possible historical record because every failure becomes evidence for the next restoration. Christianity, by contrast, makes a falsifiable claim: the church Christ promised will not be defeated. That claim has been tested against twenty centuries of history and has held. The historical record is the test. The test has been passed.

VII. Closing

The Christian Restoration series is the heart of Denver Snuffer’s public ministry, and engaging it carefully has been worth the effort. The historical scholarship is real. The pastoral seriousness is real. The willingness to speak unsparingly about the institutional Mormonism that excommunicated him is real. None of these should be dismissed.

But the framework rests on a foundational error that the entire seven-part series presupposes rather than defends: that the church Christ promised to build was substantially lost and required nineteenth-century prophetic restoration. The biblical foreclosure of that claim has stood since the April 27 essay, and the present series, despite its honest reporting of post-Smith Mormon failure, does nothing to overturn it. Indeed, by Snuffer’s own honest catalog, the gates of hell did prevail against Joseph Smith’s restoration — comprehensively, quickly, and at every level of institutional life — which is the evidence we would expect to see if the founding revelation was not what its founder claimed it was.

The altar call at bornofwater.org deserves a counter-invitation to the actual Christ — the eternal Word, identified by Peter’s confession, present in every generation through His indwelling Spirit, accessible without intermediation by any modern prophetic claimant, sufficient to save and sanctify any soul who comes to Him in faith. That invitation has been open since Pentecost. It is open today. It will remain open until He returns. There is no need to wait for the next restoration, because the original has never been lost.

Leonard, the seriousness with which you are seeking God is a thing I respect. The seeking is the right impulse. The conclusion you have reached is one I cannot follow you into, because the foundation it rests on is the foundation Christ Himself promised would not be moved, and Christ Himself has not moved it. Wherever you go from here, the Christ I commend to you is the same Christ Peter confessed at Caesarea Philippi. He is enough. He has always been enough. He will always be enough.

Thomas

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11

“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” — John 3:5

“Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” — Romans 8:9

Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.

Christ the Son of the Living God

by Thomas Abshier | Apr 28, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Upon This Rock

What Christ Was Building, and Why It Has Not Fallen

Standalone Theological Essay | April 28, 2026

Context: This essay is the natural companion to The Restoration That Was Not Needed (April 27, 2026). That essay argued, against the Snuffer/Mormon restoration claim, that Christ promised His church would not perish. The present essay does the exegetical work to defend that promise carefully — walking through Matthew 16:18 in its context, examining the three serious readings of upon this rock, and showing why the reading that integrates the rest of the New Testament’s foundation language also forecloses every restoration claim. The point is not merely defensive. Matthew 16:18 is, equally, the productive promise that Christ is building something — and what He is building is what the Christos Civitas project is consciously trying to participate in.

To the Fellowship —

There is a verse that has carried more theological weight than perhaps any other in Christian history, and it is one Christians ought to be able to handle carefully:

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18

The Roman Catholic Church has built nineteen centuries of papal authority on this verse, reading it to identify Peter himself as the rock, and the bishops of Rome as Peter’s apostolic successors holding the keys he received. Protestant traditions have, with varying degrees of confidence, rejected that reading and offered alternatives. The Mormon restoration tradition has, in its own way, conscripted the verse — claiming that the church Christ promised here was lost in apostasy and required a 19th-century prophetic restoration to be re-established.

Each of these uses of the verse cannot be right. Some of them must be wrong. And the question is significant enough that it deserves to be settled carefully — because the answer determines whether the Christ who spoke these words is trustworthy, whether the church He promised exists, where it is, and how anyone today can be sure they are standing on the foundation Christ Himself laid.

This essay walks the question carefully. I will look at the immediate context of Matthew 16, examine the Greek wordplay that has produced the exegetical disputes, lay out the three serious readings of upon this rock, and show why the reading that integrates the rest of the New Testament’s foundation language is also the reading that forecloses every restoration claim — Catholic, Protestant, or Mormon. I will close by showing why this same verse is, equally, a productive promise about what Christ is building, and why the Christos Civitas vision is simply the conscious participation in that ongoing work.

I. The Setting at Caesarea Philippi

The Matthew 16 conversation does not happen in a neutral place. Caesarea Philippi was a region thick with religious meaning, sitting at the foot of Mount Hermon in the far north of Israel. It was filled with pagan shrines — temples to Pan, an Augusteum honoring the Roman emperor’s divinity, and most strikingly, a great cliff face containing what locals called the Gates of Hades: a deep cavern from which a spring flowed, said to be the entrance to the underworld.

Christ chose this location. He took His disciples to a place visibly associated with both pagan religious authority and the very gates of hell He was about to mention. And there He asked His question:

“Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” — Matthew 16:13

The disciples reported the public opinions: John the Baptist returned, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. All of these were high opinions. None of them was the right one. Then Christ pressed:

“But whom say ye that I am?” — Matthew 16:15

Peter answered with the confession that became the hinge of Christian history:

“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” — Matthew 16:16

Christ blessed Peter immediately, naming the source of the confession:

“Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” — Matthew 16:17

Only after the confession is given, and only after Christ has identified its divine origin, does He speak the verse that has carried so much weight:

“And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” — Matthew 16:18

The gates of hell are not metaphorical scenery here. They are visible behind Him as He speaks. He is making, in front of the actual gates of Hades, a promise that the church He is building will not be overcome by them. The setting is doing theological work.

II. The Greek and the Wordplay

The verse hangs on a wordplay in the Greek that English partly preserves and partly obscures. “Thou art Petros, and upon this petra I will build my church.”

Petros — the masculine form — names Peter and connotes a stone, a piece of rock you could pick up and throw. Petra — the feminine form — names the bedrock, the rock-mass on which something can be built. The two words share a root and are obviously related, but they are not identical, and the shift from masculine to feminine in the second clause is what has given the verse its exegetical tension.

Three readings are grammatically possible:

Reading 1 — Peter himself is the rock. The masculine/feminine shift is explained by the underlying Aramaic Kepha, which has no gender variation. Kepha would naturally render into Greek as masculine Petros when used as a personal name, but as feminine petra when used as a common noun for rock. On this reading, Christ is making a deliberate name-and-meaning identification: You are Rock, and on this rock I will build my church. This is the Catholic reading and has serious historical and scholarly support.

Reading 2 — Peter’s confession is the rock. The masculine/feminine shift is intentional precisely because Christ is naming a different referent in the second clause. The rock is not Peter himself but the truth Peter has just confessed: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The church is built on the truth that Christ is Christ, the Son of the living God. This is a venerable Protestant reading, going back to the Reformers, and it has serious exegetical support.

Reading 3 — Christ Himself is the rock, identified by Peter’s confession. The masculine/feminine shift is intentional because the rock is neither Peter nor the verbal confession as such, but the Person Peter’s confession identifies — Christ Himself. The confession is the means by which Peter (and every subsequent believer) recognizes the rock that has always been there. This is Augustine’s mature reading, Calvin’s reading, and the reading that aligns most directly with the rest of the New Testament’s foundation-language. It is the reading I will defend below.

Honest scholarship recognizes that all three readings are grammatically possible from the Greek alone. The deciding factor cannot be the Greek wordplay in isolation. It has to be the broader testimony of the New Testament about what the foundation of the church actually is. And that testimony is decisive.

III. What the Apostles Said the Foundation Was

The apostolic deposit answers the foundation question repeatedly and consistently. We do not have to guess what the apostles believed Christ meant when He said upon this rock, because the apostles told us what the foundation of the church is — sometimes within a few decades of the conversation at Caesarea Philippi.

“For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:11

Paul is unambiguous. There is no other foundation. There can be no other foundation. The foundation is Jesus Christ — not Peter, not the confession as a verbal formula, but the Person.

“And are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone.” — Ephesians 2:20

Paul again. The believers are built on the foundation laid by the apostles and prophets — but the cornerstone, the load-bearing piece without which nothing stands, is Jesus Christ Himself. The apostles are the masons; Christ is the stone.

“Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded.” — 1 Peter 2:6

Now look at who is writing these words. This is Peter himself, in his own epistle, citing Isaiah and identifying the cornerstone — and he does not identify himself. He identifies Christ. Peter himself, in inspired apostolic writing, locates the foundation of the church in Christ rather than in himself. If anyone in church history would have been entitled to claim the Petrine foundation reading, it was Peter. He did not.

“Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders rejected, the same is made the head of the corner.” — 1 Peter 2:6-7

Peter unfolds the metaphor. Christ is the elect, precious cornerstone. Believers are precious to Him as they believe in Him. The disobedient reject Him, but He is made the head of the corner regardless of their rejection. The whole picture is built around Christ as the foundation, with believers being added as living stones (verse 5) into the edifice.

The apostolic deposit’s own answer to “what is the foundation” is therefore unambiguous: Christ Himself. Reading 3 is the reading that integrates Matthew 16:18 with the rest of the apostolic deposit.

This means the wordplay in Matthew 16 is doing exactly what the wordplay in 1 Corinthians 3 and Ephesians 2 and 1 Peter 2 is doing: identifying Christ as the rock, with Peter (named Petros after the rock that is Christ) serving as a stone in the edifice but not the foundation of it. The confession Peter made — “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” — is the means by which Peter recognized the foundation that was already there. Every subsequent believer who has made the same confession in truth has joined the same church on the same foundation.

IV. The Reformers’ Refinement

The Reformers, while rejecting the Catholic Petrine reading, were not always agreed on whether to land on Reading 2 (Peter’s confession) or Reading 3 (Christ Himself). The two readings are closer than they may appear, because the confession identifies Christ — and so what the confession is about is what the rock actually is.

Calvin, in his commentary on Matthew, settled clearly on Reading 3. He argued that Christ has built His church upon Himself, not upon Peter — and that Peter could only be a foundation of the church in any derivative sense if he himself rested first upon Christ as the only true foundation.

Augustine, who had earlier in his career leaned toward Reading 1, later corrected himself in his Retractations. He acknowledged that he had at one point said the church was founded upon Peter as the rock, but he wrote that he came to explain the verse differently — that the church is built upon the One whom Peter confessed when he said “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” On this corrected reading, Peter (named after the rock that is Christ) represents the person of the Church which is built upon that rock, and the careful grammar of the verse itself supports the distinction: “Thou art Peter” was said to him, but not “Thou art the rock.”

This is, I believe, exactly the right refinement. The confession and the Christ identified are inseparable. The confession is the means by which Christ-as-foundation is recognized; the confession is not, as a verbal formula, the foundation itself. The Christ Peter confessed is the rock.

This refinement also explains why Christ blessed Peter’s confession in the immediately preceding verse. “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 16:17). The blessing is for correctly identifying who Christ is. Peter saw what the disciples needed to see — what every future believer would need to see — and what the Father had revealed to him about Christ became the standing testimony of who the foundation is.

This is also why every subsequent believer who makes the same confession enters the same church on the same foundation. Peter’s confession was not a unique, unrepeatable foundational act. It was the first instance of what would become the universal mark of every Christian: the Spirit-given recognition that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

V. The Implications for the Restoration Question

Now we can return to the question the previous essay engaged. The Snuffer claim — and the Mormon claim more broadly — is that the church Christ promised in Matthew 16:18 was lost. That apostolic Christianity perished within a few generations. That the visible church that has existed for nineteen centuries is not the church Christ was building. That a 19th-century prophet was needed to restore what was lost.

With the foundation question settled, the restoration claim collapses cleanly.

The church Christ promised to build is built on Christ Himself. Not on Peter. Not on the apostolic verbal formula. Not on the institutional structures that grew up to serve and sometimes corrupt the church’s life. The foundation is the eternal Word made flesh, the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever (Hebrews 13:8). That foundation cannot be lost, because the foundation is the very Christ who said the gates of hell would not prevail.

The church is identifiable by its preservation of the apostolic confession. Wherever, in any generation, anywhere on earth, believers have confessed in truth that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, the church Christ promised has been standing on the foundation Christ laid. That confession has been preserved continuously, in writing, since the close of the New Testament. The apostolic deposit (the canonical scripture) preserves it textually. The Spirit who indwells believers reveals it inwardly. Every faithful witness in every generation has carried it forward. The chain has not broken.

Corrupt institutions have grown up around the church without becoming the church. The Catholic medieval hierarchy was, in many ways, corrupt. The state-church arrangements of post-Constantinian Christendom were often more political than spiritual. The Protestant denominations have produced their share of moral failure. Modern evangelicalism has its compromised celebrity pastors and its theological soft spots. None of this has any bearing on whether the church Christ promised has perished. The church Christ promised is the body of those who confess Christ in truth and are indwelt by His Spirit — and that body has existed, in every generation, regardless of which institutional structures around it were faithful and which were not.

The “we confess Christ too” Mormon counter has a precise answer. Mormons (Salt Lake LDS, Snuffer, every variant) will insist that they confess Christ as the Son of God. The answer is: the words are similar, the Christ identified is not. Peter’s confession identifies the eternal Word, who was God and was with God, in whom dwelt all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. That Christ has no spirit-brother named Lucifer. That Christ did not progress to godhood. That Christ accomplished the atoning work on the Cross, not in Gethsemane. The Mormon “Christ” of Joseph Smith’s revelation is, in critical respects, a different Person identified by similar words. The foundation is not the words as words but the Christ those words identify. Get the Christ wrong, and you have built somewhere else, regardless of which words you use.

This is, I believe, the complete and final answer to every restoration claim. Christ’s promise stands. The church He promised has been standing on its foundation since Pentecost. The foundation cannot be moved, because the foundation is Christ Himself, and Christ Himself has not been moved.

VI. The Productive Promise

But Matthew 16:18 is not only a defensive promise. The verse contains two clauses, and we have spent most of our attention on the second one — the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. The first clause is at least as important and is, I believe, where the Christos Civitas vision is most directly anchored:

“Upon this rock I will build my church.”

Christ is building. Active, present, ongoing. The verb oikodomeo in the Greek is not passive or static. It is the language of a master craftsman engaged in continuous construction. From the moment Peter made the confession at Caesarea Philippi, Christ has been building something on the foundation that He Himself is. The construction has not stopped. It is happening now. It will continue until what He is building is finished — until the Bride is presented to the Bridegroom not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing (Ephesians 5:27).

What is He building? The New Testament’s answer is consistent. He is building:

• A body with Him as the head (Ephesians 1:22-23, 1 Corinthians 12)
• A temple indwelt by His Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, Ephesians 2:21-22)
• A people taken out of every nation, tribe, and tongue to be a kingdom of priests (Revelation 5:9-10)
• A family of brothers and sisters of the firstborn Son (Romans 8:29, Hebrews 2:11-12)
• A city whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10), which will descend at the end as the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21)

Each of these images is a description of the same reality: a community of people, redeemed by the Cross, indwelt by the Spirit, growing in conformity to Christ, related to one another and to Him as members of one body — and bearing visible witness in the world through the life together that the Spirit produces.

This is what Christ has been building since Pentecost. Imperfectly visible, yes. Always under attack from the gates of hell, yes. Sometimes obscured by corrupt institutions claiming to be the church, yes. But genuinely present in every generation, growing toward the completion Christ promised, and never overcome.

VII. The Christos Civitas Connection

The Christos Civitas project is not the founding of something new. It is the conscious participation in what Christ has been building since Pentecost.

When the fellowship gathers on Sunday and Peter’s confession is implicitly the ground we are standing on — Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God — we are not constituting a new church. We are joining the one Christ promised at Caesarea Philippi to build, the one He has been building for two millennia, the one that has had faithful witnesses in every generation and that will never be overcome.

When we speak of building a Christian civic order — citizens whose first allegiance is to the King whose Kingdom is not of this world but is being made manifest in this world — we are speaking of the visible expression of the church’s life as it grows. The Christos Civitas is what happens when the citizens of the Kingdom take their citizenship seriously enough to let it shape their politics, their commerce, their education, their family life, their culture. It is not a separate project from what Christ is building. It is the natural overflow of what He is building when His citizens begin to act consistently with their citizenship.

This is also why the Christos Civitas project does not need a restored prophet, a new revelation, a re-opened canon, or any of the apparatus the Mormon tradition has felt it needed. The foundation is already laid. The apostolic deposit is already given. The Spirit is already indwelling every believer. What remains is for the citizens of the Kingdom to live consistently with their citizenship — and the shape of that consistent living, applied to civic and cultural life, is the Christos Civitas.

The work is ours to do, but the foundation is not ours to lay. “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

VIII. What the Reading Forecloses, and What It Opens

Let me close by naming what this reading of Matthew 16:18 forecloses and what it opens.

What it forecloses:

• The Catholic Petrine reading — that the bishop of Rome holds unique apostolic authority by succession from Peter as the personal foundation of the church. The personal foundation is Christ, not Peter; succession from Peter does not transmit a personal-foundational authority Peter himself never claimed.
• Every restorationist claim — that the church Christ built was lost and required some 19th-century prophetic restoration. The church cannot be lost because the foundation cannot be moved.
• The view that institutional purity is the mark of the true church — whether Catholic, Protestant, or Restorationist. Visible institutions can be more or less faithful, but the church is identifiable by Peter’s confession preserved in truth, not by institutional perfection.
• Sola ecclesia in any form — the view that any visible institution is, as such, the church. The church is the body of those who make the apostolic confession in truth and are indwelt by the Spirit. Visible institutions serve that body but do not constitute it.

What it opens:

• Confidence in Christ’s promise. The church has not perished. It cannot perish. It has been standing on its foundation since Pentecost and will stand until the Bridegroom returns.
• Liberty for the believer. You do not need a prophet, a hierarchy, a magisterium, or a Restoration Edition to be standing on the foundation. You need the apostolic confession (which the closed canon preserves) and the indwelling Spirit (whom Christ has sent to every believer). That is what the foundation requires. That is what makes you a citizen.
• Catholicity in the deepest sense. The church Christ has been building includes every believer, in every generation, in every nation, who has made the apostolic confession in truth — Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Pentecostal, the unnamed faithful in places church history barely records. We are joined, across all these lines, by the foundation we share, even where institutional walls obscure the joining.
• The vocation of building. What Christ is building, He invites us to participate in. The Christos Civitas vision is one form of that participation — a deliberate effort to let citizenship in the Kingdom shape civic and cultural life. Other believers will participate in other ways. The body has many members, and the Spirit gives gifts severally as He wills.

The verse that has carried more weight than perhaps any other in Christian history is, when read carefully, the most reassuring promise in the gospel for those who wonder whether they are standing on the right ground. The right ground is Christ, identified by the apostolic confession, preserved in every generation, indwelling every true believer by the Spirit He sent. The gates of hell have never prevailed and will never prevail.

We are on the foundation. We have always been on the foundation. The work now is to live consistently with the citizenship we have, and to invite every soul we meet into the same citizenship — including the ones currently inside Restoration movements, who have been told the foundation was lost and need to be told the truth: the foundation is Christ, the foundation has not been lost, and the door to the foundation is the same confession Peter made on a Galilean hillside two thousand years ago — that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

That is enough. That has always been enough. That will always be enough.

Thomas

“For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building. According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon. For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” — 1 Corinthians 3:9-11

Renaissance Ministries | Standalone Theological Essay One heart to make Christ King.